The media was all abuzz about a video Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted out in regards to Jim Acosta's disbarring:
https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/1060374680991883265
Many outlets claimed that this video originated with Paul Joseph Watson/Infowars and it was altered.
Are both these claims correct?
Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) has been quite open about producing the video:
The video was not "doctored" by me - all I did was zoom in on the original from the Daily Wire. I did not 'speed up' anything.
He even published a screenshot of his video editing session, which shows edits made in order to repeat the action in close-up, and the filename of the source video clip, DrasJZTWwAAU5hs.mp4.
I have not yet seen an authoritative analysis of the timeline (and I would not consider the question of alteration to be “answered” without one), but the filename indicates that the original video clip, on which Watson based his edited version, is this: https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/DrasJZTWwAAU5hs.mp4
This is consistent with Watson’s claim that his source material was from this tweet from The Daily Wire, dated “9:46 AM - 7 Nov 2018”, which links to the same video URL. The origin of that video clip appears to be this tweet by @ForAmerica, dated “9:34 AM - 7 Nov 2018” which also has the same video URL. The origin and history of the video is also described by Paris Martineau writing in Wired.
The first appearance of Watson’s edited version seems to be his tweet dated “5:33 pm - 7 Nov 2018”. This version runs for 15 seconds but contains only material from the original 3-second clip, with progressively zoomed and cropped replays of the “crucial moment”, which plays six times in total. This version has poorer image quality, and alternate frames are blended together.
Apart from the obvious crop-zoom-loop, there is a duplicated frame just as Acosta and the woman make contact (frames 2 and 3 below). This was noted by digital forensic and image analysis expert Hany Farid in reports from Wired and The New Yorker. Farid further noted:
This could have been done intentionally, but could also be the result of transcoding that changes the frame rate
and:
I don’t see unambiguous evidence that it has been doctored.
This repeated frame occurs in both the zoomed and unzoomed cuts in Watson’s video:
There is another duplicated frame a little later (frames 2 and 3; look carefully at the woman’s hair).
These duplicate frames appear both in the edited video tweeted by Watson and in the video issued by Sanders, but not in the DrasJZTWwAAU5hs.mp4 source video, frames of which are shown below:
That is, it does not appear that the video was altered by the White House.
So, the doubled frames could be deliberate attempts to exaggerate the action, but they could also be accidental technical glitches. Watson himself has repeatedly stated that the video was not doctored, but the fact remains that the exact sequence of frames used and repeated in his video is different from the video he based his edit upon.
According to the Washington Post, experts agree that the video is altered:
Side-by-side comparisons support claims from fact-checkers and experts such as Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, who argued that crucial parts of the video appear to have been altered so as to distort the action.
A frame-by-frame breakdown by Storyful, a social-media intelligence firm that verifies media content, found that the edited video included repeated frames that did not appear in the original footage. The repeated frames were shown only at the moment of contact and made Acosta’s arm movement look more exaggerated, said Shane Raymond, a journalist at Storyful.
Arstechnica reports that two experts agree that the video was altered:
The video is altered, Shapiro told the AP, to make Acosta's actions as he held on to the microphone look faster and more aggressive. [...] Video producer Jamison Hermann separately told The Verge that he suspected the clip was doctored after analyzing the press version of the video and the While House's version of the video frame by frame.
Vice quotes a professor who agrees that the video is changed and gives an incorrect impression, but who thinks that there is not enough evidence that the video was "doctored":
“From my review of the various videos of the press conference, I believe that the video tweeted by the Press Secretary is misleading but I don’t see unambiguous evidence that it has been doctored,” Farid told Motherboard via email. “A combination of a reduction in the quality of the video, a slowing-down of the video, and the particular vantage point of the CSPAN video gives the appearance that there was more contact between the reporter and the intern than there probably was. In particular, if you look at original, higher-quality videos from other vantage points you can more clearly see that while there was some contact between the reporter and intern, he did not strike her as his hand comes down.”
They quote a second expert who agrees:
"There are duplicate frames at the moment of contact; 2 additional frames for no apparent reason but one could surmise that it could give the false impression of a split second more contact then there actually was," Smith wrote.
Kellyanne Conway also agrees that the video was changed ("sped up") (though she disagrees that this means that the video was "altered").
Conclusion: Experts agree that the video shared by Sanders is not identical to the original video, that it comes from a dubious source - an editor of the far-right, fake news website InfoWars, and that it may give a wrong impression.
Where there is disagreement is if the words "doctored", "altered", or "sped up" should be used to describe the change, and whether or not this change was deliberate (both of which are opinion-based and go to the motivation of people, and are thus not on-topic here).
