Sort of yes, sort of no.

But it’s telling what MAGA considers the supposed controversy here to be. In a sane GOP, the controversy would be that an ex-president is still casually asserting election fraud despite trying and failing for nine months to prove it. A secondary controversy would be the ethical question of whether a news organization like Fox should ever be in the business of bowdlerizing interviews because the content is somehow “problematic.” It’s one thing to retract something that’s defamatory but nothing Trump said in the relevant portion of his interview defamed anyone, as you’ll see. So why was it edited after the fact?

Neither of those controversies is why this episode has gotten Trumpworld’s attention, though. The controversy is purely that someone at Fox failed another dumb loyalty test by not amplifying Trump’s bogus election fraud conspiracy theory. That’s all.

It started this way:

WOW. So I went to post a clip from President Trump's great interview from @FoxNews last night, and lo and behold, Fox News EDITED and CHANGED what President Trump said, censoring out 45 accurately describing the Fake Election.

Here is what President Trump said: pic.twitter.com/4aNKXioky4

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) August 8, 2021

That was clipped from Fox News television’s broadcast of the interview with Dan Bongino. The online video version of the interview at FoxNews.com also contains Trump’s answer in full. But watch the YouTube version and you’ll find something missing.

Here’s the original answer, via Mediaite. The boldfaced part isn’t in the YouTube version:

It’s a disgrace what’s happening, and I don’t think the country’s gonna stand for it much longer. They’re disgusted. You have a fake election, you have an election with voter abuse and with voter fraud like nobody’s ever seen before. And based on that, and based on what happened, they’re destroying our country. Whether it’s at the border, whether it’s on crime, I could say in plenty of instances, including military.

If he had said something about Dominion, or accused a particular election official somewhere of criminal activity, that might be sufficiently defamatory that Fox would scramble to remove it in order to avoid legal liability. But he didn’t. If Fox was worried about his comment coming back to bite the company in a lawsuit, they wouldn’t have included it in the version of the interview posted at FoxNews.com. The edit is specific to YouTube for some reason.

A subplot here is that the missing comment came during an interview with Bongino, one of the most hardcore MAGA populists in righty media. If anyone should be able to pass a “did Biden cheat?” litmus test, it’s him. As various Trump fans reminded him yesterday, his show is called “Unfiltered” — yet here was Trump being filtered in the YouTube version of their chat. Once Trump spokesman Liz Harrington began grousing about the edit on Twitter yesterday, complaints began flooding into Bongino:

https://t.co/ILDgRnCtaL pic.twitter.com/jSPgAp57Rs

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) August 8, 2021

pic.twitter.com/v7NY4LI75D

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) August 8, 2021

“I feel betrayed by a lot of people,” he said on his radio show today about the criticism aimed at him. “I’ve been called everything this weekend. Sellout, traitor. Pay-triot, with a P-A-Y, which is unbelievable.”

I’m shocked that he’s shocked. If Mike Pence’s career trajectory proves anything it’s that, to MAGA, you’re only as loyal as your last litmus test. You can spend five years slavishly defending Trump but once you let him down, especially if you let him down on something related to the election, your loyalty is forever in doubt. Loyalty means total loyalty, full stop.

Today Bongino made clear to listeners that his loyalty never wavered. He didn’t authorize the edit to the YouTube version, he claimed. Fox did that on its own, to comply with some sort of rule set by YouTube.

.@dbongino addresses controversy over edited Trump interview posted on the Fox News YouTube channel:

"That is not acceptable to me."

Find your local station to listen LIVE: https://t.co/IK6DZpbTzJ

Or watch here: https://t.co/NaTE4NeVLy pic.twitter.com/xlWDPDPcC4

— Bongino Report (@BonginoReport) August 9, 2021

Why is a news agency agreeing to excise non-defamatory (and clearly newsworthy) content at the request of another company, particularly when it has a website of its own on which it can post its video content? Did YouTube threaten to boot Fox from its site entirely if it didn’t remove the bit from Trump’s interview with Bongino?

That would be surprising since there are plenty of clips of Trump alleging election fraud still available on the site. But if YouTube did make that request of Fox, questions necessarily follow. What other content edits is it demanding from news agencies? Which agencies have complied with those demands? What penalty was threatened if Fox refused to comply? News clips on YouTube are supposed to be documentary evidence of events. If the company is memory-holing bits and pieces of them for ideological reasons then nothing on the site can be trusted.

Not that it should be trusted to begin with, but in our online dystopia there needs to be some repository of documentary truth one can rely on. Fox and YouTube need to explain what happened with Trump’s interview.