“CBS This Morning” co-anchor Gayle King took to Twitter to complain about the way CBS News excerpted her recent interview with former WNBA player Lisa Leslie about basketball great Kobe Bryant – a rare display of a major news personality visibly at odds with her network over editorial judgement.
In a two-part video posted to Twitter Thursday, King told followers she was “advised to say nothing,” but that wasn’t “good enough” after a snippet of an interview in which King asked Leslie her thoughts about accusations in 2003 that Bryant had raped a woman. A criminal case against Bryant was dropped on Sept. 1, 2004, after the accuser declined to testify. In August of that year, the woman filed a civil lawsuit, which was settled out of court on March 2, 2005. People who saw the clip were led to believe King had asked only about Bryant’s legal woes.
“If I had only seen the clip that you saw, I would be extremely angry with me too. I am mortified, I am embarrassed and I am very angry,” King said. “Unbeknownst to me, my network put up a clip from a very wide-ranging interview, totally taken out of context and when you see it that way, it’s very jarring,” she said.
King is dealing with a phenomenon that rattles many TV-news anchors, who often come under intense social-media scrutiny for clips of longer exchanges or segments that last just seconds on social-media outlets. They are then subject to angry remarks and backlash, even though the people who are commenting have not seen their work in full. King said in her comments Thursday that she had insisted a Leslie response about the time not being right for a longer discussion about the accusations against Bryant be included in the TV segment.
“When the interview aired, we had a great reaction to it. I talked to Lisa last night. I believe that Lisa was OK with the interview. And I felt really good about the interview. Really good about the interview. So for the network to take the most salacious part, when taken out of context, and put it up online for people who didn’t see the interview is very upsetting to me and that’s something I’m going to have to deal with with them. There will be a very intense discussion about that.”
A CBS News spokesperson could not be reached for immediate comment.
Few major TV anchors have not had to grapple with social-media backlash in recent years. As more TV-news operations turn to digital media to lure younger viewers, they are flooding Twitter and other outlets with short video bursts that contain enough to grab an individual’s attention, and can hopefully push that person to seek out more at a news outlet’s own platform. But the clips isolate a piece of an interview, or even a longer bit of dialogue – and often contain context-free questions, declarations or on-screen reactions that spur outsize reaction. That reaction often draws other social-media users to the discussion, and an anchor or correspondent can be pilloried without being able to defend themselves or get people to watch a fuller presentation.
More to come…