A video shows MSNBC host Rachel Maddow becoming emotional while reporting on a news item that suggested Elon Musk is considering buying the news channel.
This video has been edited, and miscaptioned. The original video of Ms Maddow is from 2018, and shows her becoming emotional when reading an item about child migrants being separated from their parents.
A video clip which appears to show a television host for the US news channel MSNBC reacting emotionally to a news item about Elon Musk buying the channel has been edited.
The video, which has been widely shared on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, shows Rachel Maddow struggling to speak. A banner which reads “Breaking news Elon Musk posts dangerous meme” appears at the bottom of the screen.
In part of the clip, after taking time to pause after appearing to become emotional, Ms Maddow says: “Can we put up a graphic of this?”
A screenshot of a post on X (warning: explicit content) shared by Mr Musk on 24 November then appears. The post includes a meme which he appears to be using to imply he is considering buying MSNBC.
Mr Musk also teased the idea of purchasing the network in another X post from 22 November, when he replied “How much does it cost?” to a post from Donald Trump Jr. in which the president-elect’s son suggested the entrepreneur could buy the news channel.
But both the news banner and the pop-up graphic have been edited into an old video.
The clip actually dates from June 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term as US president, and shows Ms Maddow’s reaction to a breaking item on her programme about young child migrants being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border and sent to shelters.
MSNBC’s owner, Comcast, has announced it will spin off some of its cable networks, including MSNBC, into a new publicly traded company. But there is no evidence that the channel is currently “for sale”—the move to a new company is reportedly to take around a year.
We have fact checked a number of miscaptioned and altered videos about US current affairs, including a clip of Kamala Harris appearing to call President Biden “unstable” and an edited video of a crowd drowning out Barack Obama with an offensive chant.
Before sharing content you see on social media it’s important to consider whether it is genuine, and really shows what it claims to. Our guides to verifying images and videos can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the video is actually from 2018, and has been altered with a fake “breaking news” banner and pop-up edited in to appear as if it is about a report on Elon Musk.
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