ANDREA TANTAROS (CO-HOST): The White House is under fire today, accused of censoring a video of French President François Hollande where he used the words “Islamist Terrorism.” The remarks were part of Hollande's address last week at the nuclear summit in Washington, D.C. The White House reportedly posted video to its website with no edits, but then took it down and then re-uploaded it with that phrase missing. Take a listen.
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TANTAROS: Are you buying this, Smitty?
SANDRA SMITH (CO-HOST): No, I'm not. Because wouldn't that be really, really interesting timing to have that technical glitch occur.
LISA KENNEDY MONTGOMERY (CO-HOST): On that one word.
SMITH: And thank you to the Media Research Center, the media watchdog who actually caught this gap [INAUDIBLE]. But I guess this leaves you wondering what else is being censored and what is coming out from these parts of the world and being delivered to us from the White House. And they're in complete denial of it. It leaves you wondering even more.
TANTAROS: It's funny you should ask that, Sandra, because we know, Kennedy, that over 160 intelligence agents stood up and said, “They're trying to censor our intelligence reports. They're trying to get us to strike any threat of Islamic jihadism from our intel reports and they have been doing this for almost eight years. ”
KENNEDY: I mean, that's censorship. What more do you want? That is the prototypical definition of censorship. You have a government agency, or agent, shutting down peoples' speech. They do it with the press, they do it with intelligence, as you pointed out, and now they're doing it with one of our allies, the president of France. And you've got to be sensitive to what François Hollande has been through in his country. Look at the attacks that that country has withstood, and he's bold enough to stand up and say this is Islamist terror. You have to qualify exactly what it is, and it's so Machiavellian, it's so politically convenient for this White House, who refuses to use that term, to drop it so boldly.
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TANTAROS: When the French are less politically correct than America I think it's a bit troubling on this issue. It is the one word that he refuses to say. And I saw a bunch of people joking around on Twitter, “Maybe he got some ideas from his Cuba trip on censorship,” because it's really odd that the White House would censor those words.
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FAULKNER: Come on, let's talk about this like it's really happening in words that we all know are true, and that's what they're doing. And we don't want to be the only country that's not doing that. That makes us look weak.
