ABC News and Reuters used their video editing skills to slow down and highlight a key point of a video that showed the president wearing his watch, and then without it seconds later. The obvious, and wrong, conclusion was that one of his ecstatic fans in Albania must have swiped it. In fact, it was simply the president’s swift, backwards handoff of the watch to a guard right behind him.
Like all videos that disagree with the official government line, this one almost definitely suggested that emphatic White House denials are not the whole truth. (A series of grainy photographs added to the case). Here’s what the official line said, as reported by Britain’s Guardian:
A White House spokeswoman denied today that that the President had been robbed. She also denied other Albanian reports that Mr Bush’s watch did fall off during the vigorous walkabout but that it was returned to a bodyguard. Instead the spokeswoman said that Mr Bush had removed it himself. “He took it off,” she said.
When challenged that this did not seem to happen during the footage shown on YouTube, the spokeswoman said: “I’m not going to change what I’m saying. I was told that he took it off about the one-minute mark.”
Earlier, The Lede focused on the open watch question with an item headlined “Did Bush Get His Watch Stolen?” This is the update, which included the following video that left everyone guessing.
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