I want to preface this post quickly. I am not a conspiracy theory nut. I like to think that what I’m told is what is happening, which is somewhat naive of me. I understand that there are secrets that I’m not privy to, but I don’t believe that there is a New World Order and I do believe Al Qaeda was behind 9/11.

With this in mind, I truly feel that NBC was trying to further some agenda on Sunday when they “regrettably” “edited out” a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance to remove “Under God”. I believe this was a concept thought of by some high level executive, and not by some lowly intern who accidentally forgot to include that phrase. Check out the video below.

I understand what NBC was trying to do with that clip. T he U.S. Open was near Washington, DC and they wanted to tie in the patriotic theme. Cool… I am all for that. However, there are a thousand other ways they could’ve done that. By using the Pledge of Allegiance, someone on top was able to satisfy those special interest groups calling for the Pledge to be revised. (note: it is not lost on me the irony/coincidence that NBC is the same network that no more than two weeks helped to demand Tracy Morgan issue an apology for what he said in a comedy club.¹)

Even their apology was filled with insincere “lawyer” dribble.

“We began our coverage of this final round just about three hours ago, and when we did it was our intent to begin the coverage of this U.S. Open championship with a feature that captured the patriotism of our national championship being held in our nation’s capital for the third time. Regrettably, a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance that was in that feature was edited out. It was not done to upset anyone, and we’d like to apologize to those of you who were offended by it.”

Mistakes like that aren’t made unintentionally. These “mistakes” are very calculated risk. Yes, they faced a Twitter backlash on Sunday, but in two days, no one will be talking about it. NBC will have ‘gotten away with’ this mistake with nothing more than issuing their crappy apology.

I don’t even want to think of what “accidental omission” is next.

¹ – For another discussion, maybe tomorrow?