The Conversation (0)
News
CNN reporter Jim Acosta has been suspended from the White House following an angry confrontation with Donald Trump on Wednesday.
The incident took place in a post-midterms press conference, where Trump was asked about the ongoing Robert Mueller investigation and his own impeachment.
Taken aback by Acosta's questioning, Trump continues to tell him 'that's enough,' labels him 'rude' and demands that he sits down, which leads to an intern trying to take the microphone from the journalist.
Here is a video that CNN shared of the moment.
Shortly after this Acosta confirmed on Twitter that his press credentials for the White House had been revoked as a result of the incident, including a video of him handing his pass over to a member of the secret service.
According to a series of tweets from press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House took this measure against Acosta as they could not tolerate him placing his hands on the intern.
Acosta responded to the tweets and claimed that they were a lie.
A further tweet from Sanders featured a video which appears to show that Acosta did touch the woman with his arm, making a chopping movement to prevent her from taking the microphone from him.
Sanders post has also been retweeted by the White House Twitter account but the interaction between Acosta and the intern was not featured in the official White House stream of the press conference, as seen below.
The video shared by Sanders has already been viewed over 2 million times.
The legitimacy of the video immediately came into question with people accusing Sanders of sharing a doctored video, which attempted to exaggerate Acosta's arm movement.
The origin of this video appears to have been shared by Paul Joseph Watson, a contributor to Alex Jones's right-wing conspiracy theory website InfoWars.
The InfoWars video has been considerably doctored to the original footage that was made available by CNN.
Not only does it not include any audio, which prevents viewers from hearing Acosta say to the woman 'pardon me, ma'am,' is noticeably slower and of a lower quality.
There would also appear to be a small number of frames missing from the edit shared by Sanders which makes it look like Acosta's arm movement was much more sudden.
This is most noticeable in the slowed down versions of the video, where other people's movements, including Trump are marginally ahead of the video shared by Sanders.
Once this became apparent people began asking why a member of the incumbent administration would share a video from such a questionable source, in order to justify their stance against Acosta.
The White House is yet to confirm how they obtained the footage.
CNN has released a statement in support of Acosta and accused Sanders of lying and providing "fraudulent accusations" and "cited an incident that never happened."
Top 100
x