I'm not much of a conspiracy nut but I don't have any issues with the excerpt you quoted. Those "reality" TV shows are famously heavily scripted and edited, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they did script the "skip dessert to attend to vital business" to some degree. Maybe he did have to leave early because of a scheduled meeting but it just didn't have the same ring to it?

Now you could say that it's not a big deal either way and I would tend to agree but one could argue that there's a slippery slope when you muddy the line between reality and fiction in the minds of the audience of a mass media.