One day after dubbing a clip of Mitt Romney talking about the sandwich ordering process at Wawa the candidate’s “super market scanner moment,” Andrea Mitchell responded to the controversy — but she didn’t exactly apologize for it. Mitchell said the RNC and the campaign had both reached out to her MSNBC show to point out that Romney was actually talking about “federal bureaucracy and innovation in the private sector,” not the wonders of modern hoagie technology. She then aired the longer clip, which they “didn’t get a chance to play” earlier, but a follow-up statement from MSNBC made it clear that the network isn’t admitting it’s guilty of some misleading reporting.
A network rep said, “MSNBC did not edit anything out of order or out of sequence and at no time did we intend to deceive our viewers.” Yes, those words definitely came out of Romney’s mouth, but their meaning was distorted when MSNBC omitted the first part of his metaphor and Mitchell chuckled, saying that he clearly hadn’t “been in too many Wawas along the roadside in Pennsylvania.” That’s the beauty of the Out-of-Context Gaffe!
