Greg Kandra, who worked for many years at CBS News in New York and Washington, watches the latest NBC News creative editing outrage and justifiably blows a gasket. Excerpt:

 I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made.   I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.

But now?

Forget it. I’m done.  You deserve what they’re saying about you.  It’s earned.  You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you.  You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more.  You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.

Take a look at the Andrea Mitchell clip, and then a fuller presentation of Romney’s remarks (both here) [Link fixed now — RD]. This isn’t even a close call. It’s outrageously biased.

Leaving the editing aside, Mitchell’s snide condescension to Romney for having gone to his first Wawa store is dishonest in another way. She portrays it as if everybody has gone to Wawa, a convenience store, except Richie Rich Romney. I’ll eat my hat if Andrea “Mrs. Alan Greenspan” Mitchell has ever darkened the door of a Wawa. Secondly, Wawa is a Mid-Atlantic chain. Not a New England chain, a Mid-Atlantic chain. I had never been to a Wawa either before I moved to PA. Their stores are concentrated around Philly. And yes, their touchpad sandwich ordering system is unlike any I’ve seen anywhere else. It is completely understandable that a Massachusetts resident would be pleasantly surprised to visit a local convenience store in another region of the country and encounter unfamiliar technology. Most Americans who stop by a Wawa if they travel through the Mid-Atlantic states would be surprised by the Wawa touchpad.

Andrea Mitchell’s pissy little report was a smear through and through.