Fox News host falsifies footage to make GOP protest look bigger
By John Byrne Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 -- 9:02 am
Share on Facebook Stumble This! How many protesters were in attendance at Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachmann's tea party healthcare protest?
"I climbed the Capitol steps just before the event started so that I could get a good view of the whole crowd," the Washington Post's onetime White House reporter and columnist Dana Milbank wrote Friday. "I divided it into sections and counted. That's where I came up with 5,000. It's possible more came after I did my count, but nothing near 10,000."
A few dozen Republican House members attended, aimed at stirring up a crowd against Democrats' healthcare reform bill. Fox News' Sean Hannity interviewed Bachmann following the event.
"20,000+ people showed up," Hannity said. "Were you as surprised as I was?"
Bachmann smiled and replied.
Story continues below... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- After showing the clip, Stewart said: "Anywhere between 20 and 40,000 people. Or, as the Washington Post put it, 10,000."
Stewart then showed two clips Fox News employed to underscore the size of the event. He pointed out that the clips appeared to have been from two entirely different protests.
"I'm sorry, can we get back again," Stewart remarked. "That was weird. Because when that clip started, it was a clear fall day in Washington, D.C. Not a cloud in the sky, the leaves have changed.
"All of a sudden, the trees turn green again, and it's cloudy, and it looks like thousands and thousands of more people arrived," he continued. "If I didn't know any better, I would think they just put two different days together and acted like they didn't."
The bogus footage, Stewart found, actually came from a Sept. 12 protest two months ago, and was used on Fox News' Glenn Beck program two months ago.
Fox News caught red-handed (again) doctoring video November 18, 2009 5:54 pm ET by Matt Gertz
UPDATE: For photographic proof that one of the rallies Fox News presented as being from Palin's book tour actually last year on the campaign trail, go here.
As the folks over at Think Progress note, Fox News's Gregg Jarrett today used old stock footage of a McCain-Palin rally from last year to illustrate how Sarah Palin is "continuing to draw huge crowds" during her book tour. He was apparently not tipped off by the McCain campaign "Country First" sign in one of the shots, nor did he wonder why Palin would be using a teleprompter to plug her book.
This is the second time in ten days Fox News has been caught deceptively using video to advance a misleading storyline - and that's just the tip of Fox News' video-doctoring iceberg. Maybe now Howard Kurtz will admit that there's a larger cultural problem with Fox News?
I'm not going to get caught up into G-man's foolishness of attacking the liberal because G-man doesn't like the facts, I'll just requote.
Originally Posted By: Matter-eater Man
Quote:
Fox News caught red-handed (again) doctoring video November 18, 2009 5:54 pm ET by Matt Gertz
UPDATE: For photographic proof that one of the rallies Fox News presented as being from Palin's book tour actually last year on the campaign trail, go here.
As the folks over at Think Progress note, Fox News's Gregg Jarrett today used old stock footage of a McCain-Palin rally from last year to illustrate how Sarah Palin is "continuing to draw huge crowds" during her book tour. He was apparently not tipped off by the McCain campaign "Country First" sign in one of the shots, nor did he wonder why Palin would be using a teleprompter to plug her book.
This is the second time in ten days Fox News has been caught deceptively using video to advance a misleading storyline - and that's just the tip of Fox News' video-doctoring iceberg. Maybe now Howard Kurtz will admit that there's a larger cultural problem with Fox News?
Well I've certainly never seen any news reports or newspaper stories with stock footage used before. MEM's Media Matters has sure got a scoop here. Fox News must be the Devil.
Fox News VP in May: We don't have an accuracy problem - how's that still going? November 23, 2009 3:24 pm ET by Eric Hananoki
In May, new Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente told TVNewser that "probably the most important imprint [of Fox News] has been the fact that no big story has ever had to be taken off the air, that for almost 13 years, there hasn't been the kind of issue that others have had in terms of having to take things down, or apologize, or pay out on. So I'd love to have the next 13 years be as strong as the previous 13 have been."
Today, FishbowlDC posted a Fox News memo acknowledging "a series of mistakes on FNC in recent months" and pledging to "quality check everything before it makes air, and we never having [sic] to explain, retract, qualify or apologize again." The memo added that "[m]istakes by any member of the show team that end up on air may result in immediate disciplinary action" and "jobs are on the line here."
Fox News' first year under President Obama has been rife with errors, falsehoods and smears. We've documented that Fox News has apologized for some - but certainly not the vast majority - of its misinformation.
Over the years, Fox News has protected its brand by pushing the myth that it hasn't had to issue retractions for its stories. Like Clemente, in 2005, Fox News chairman and chief executive officer Roger Ailes was quoted by the Washington Post claiming that "in his nine years at Fox, 'I've never deleted a word, a phrase, a story. ... Unlike Newsweek and the Koran incident, [Ailes] adds, Fox hasn't just done a major retraction."
While Fox News management may quibble about the definition of "big" and "major," the Fox News "no retraction" line is silly. Even before Clemente and Ailes' remarks, Fox News issued multiple retractions and apologies. During the 2008 campaign, Fox News was one of the leaders in spreading the smear - later retracted - that Obama "spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father -- as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa." If you followed the cottage industry of smears against Obama, this was certainly a "big" story.
It's clear that Fox News has a cultural problem. What's not clear is whether Fox News management will make good on its threats.
To wit, Fox & Friends has been repeatedly admonished for airing multiple fake stories - including the madrassa smear. Then-Fox News executive John Moody issued memos and statements warning staff to get things right. Sound familiar? Yet Fox & Friends and the offending hosts are still on the air, pushing smears and falsehoods - when not photoshopping pictures of New York Times reporters, or remarking on America's lack of pure genes.
More recently, Fox News apologized for starting the fake story that Obama watched an HBO documentary of himself instead of election returns. Fox News was apparently so serious about its apology that Fox News Watch host Jon Scott repeated the fake story again days later while mocking Obama.
I think its great that media matters keeps repeating itself on fox's mistakes when they let the president slide on every fuck up he does. Its good someone has their priorities straight.
November 6th, 2012: Americas new Independence Day.
"Daily Show" producer Ramin Hedayati spends his morning flipping back and forth between the "Today Show" and "The Early Show," glancing at major news sites and political blogs and reading The New York Times. When he gets into the office, he scans through news shows recorded on the office's 13 TiVos and looks for glaring inconsistencies, misleading reports and humorous soundbites.
While watching Sean Hannity's coverage of an anti-health-care-reform rally at the Capitol last week, he knew something wasn't quite right. "I remember saying to myself ...'There couldn't be a more beautiful day for this rally.' Then all of a sudden it went to cloudy footage," said Hedayati. "Hannity used footage from Glenn Beck's 9/12 rally to make his rally look bigger ... We were surprised that no one else caught it."
Hannity responded last week to the show's uncovering of the inconsistency, saying the video switch-up was an "inadvertent mistake."
While its touts itself as a comedy show first and foremost, "The Daily Show" is also an unabashed media critic and ombudsman of sorts that exposes journalists' wrongdoings and shortcomings.
"I feel like there are lot of critics of the government but there are very few critics of the media who have an audience and are credible and keep a watch on things," said "Daily Show" writer Elliott Kalan. "That's a role that we provide that we take very seriously."
Kalan said the biggest mistakes he sees the mainstream media make involve overreaction and early reaction to the news. On television especially, he said, everything is "a scoop" or "breaking news" even when it's not. He noted that presenting the coverage in such a way leads networks to give news a level of speed and intensity that can sometimes get in the way of facts.
The liberal-leaning "Daily Show" more often than not picks on Fox News and conservative commentators such as Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.
But it also takes satirical jabs at other mainstream media outlets. Recently, it criticized CNN for saying "let's leave it there" during critical parts of an interview and, in another show, made light of nightly news broadcasters getting too excited about having covered the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
At the same time that "The Daily Show" is critiquing the media, it's also establishing itself as a "trusted" news source, even though it doesn't refer to itself as one.
Calling out the media when it takes things out of context, overplays the news
"The Daily Show" often points out when the media doesn't do their job -- such as when host Jon Stewart called out CNBC's Jim Cramer for repeating corporate spin instead of investigating the truth.
"Daily Show" Segment Producer Patrick King said the episode exposing Cramer's contradictions "was less about finding inconsistencies as it was about going at the heart of what that network reports itself to be. It holds itself to be the 'end all, be all' of economic journalism, but when you actually watch it leading up to the recession, you see they were really giving terrible advice based on conventional wisdom on Wall Street."
One of the show's rules is to not trust any source too much until it's been confirmed by another source. The show's 11 writers and eight producers -- who range in age from their early 20s to mid 40s and four of whom are women -- say they often check The New York Times and other newspapers to verify the facts and figures they hear on TV or read about on blogs. They also have a researcher and fact-checker, Adam Chodikoff, who makes sure any information that's used has been verified by multiple sources.
"We work very hard to make sure that we don't take anything out of context," King explained, "just because we like to think at the end of the day that what we're doing is right and correct, but also because while the networks don't respond to us all that much, people attack us and criticize us and we don't want to give them ammunition than they need."
They're not afraid to provide that ammunition, however, if they believe it will make a point. During a 2004 interview on the now-defunct "Crossfire," for instance, Stewart said the show was "hurting America," and that "we need help from the media, and they're hurting us." It's this type of stance on issues that King said he wishes more mainstream journalists would take when interviewing politicians.
Seeing the value in analysis & informed opinion
Too often, King said, journalists' political coverage -- and that of media critics -- ends up being sanitized and nothing but a perfunctory he said/she said exchange. "If you were going to talk about whether the earth is flat, and 99 percent of scientists are saying it's round, and 1 percent are saying it's flat, you wouldn't bring on the 1 percent guy," he said. "That viewpoint is factually inaccurate and they shouldn't bring him on just to give the illusion of balance."
When both sides are represented, writer Elliott Kalan said, there needs to be more fact-checking and deeper questioning: "A senator or governor will be on the news and will say something completely biased, and newscasters won't call them on it. They should be checking these people. Instead they don't want to alienate them and they let them say whatever they want."
He argued that the news media -- and political commentators -- need to look more critically at both sides of an issue, and spend more time breaking down complicated talking points for news consumers. Too often, Kalan said, journalists adhere to neutrality to the point where it paralyzes their ability to ask tough questions and undermines the power of objective, informed opinion.
Kalan described objectivity as having opinions that are pro-facts, and neutrality as meaning you have no stake and no say. "The Daily Show," he said, aims to be objective. And funny.
"The fact is, we are a comedy show, and if it's not funny we're not doing it, no matter how big of an issue it is," King said. "We care really passionately about the things we do, but first and foremost we have to make people laugh."
"I think we have to find a way for well-researched, intelligent programming to become entertaining again," said Hedayati. "Sensationalism may prove just too damn fun to watch, though."
Knutreturns said: Spoken like the true Greatest RDCW Champ!
"Daily Show" producer Ramin Hedayati spends his morning flipping back and forth between the "Today Show" and "The Early Show," glancing at major news sites and political blogs and reading The New York Times. When he gets into the office, he scans through news shows recorded on the office's 13 TiVos and looks for glaring inconsistencies, misleading reports and humorous soundbites.
While watching Sean Hannity's coverage of an anti-health-care-reform rally at the Capitol last week, he knew something wasn't quite right. "I remember saying to myself ...'There couldn't be a more beautiful day for this rally.' Then all of a sudden it went to cloudy footage," said Hedayati. "Hannity used footage from Glenn Beck's 9/12 rally to make his rally look bigger ... We were surprised that no one else caught it."
Hannity responded last week to the show's uncovering of the inconsistency, saying the video switch-up was an "inadvertent mistake."
While its touts itself as a comedy show first and foremost, "The Daily Show" is also an unabashed media critic and ombudsman of sorts that exposes journalists' wrongdoings and shortcomings.
"I feel like there are lot of critics of the government but there are very few critics of the media who have an audience and are credible and keep a watch on things," said "Daily Show" writer Elliott Kalan. "That's a role that we provide that we take very seriously."
Kalan said the biggest mistakes he sees the mainstream media make involve overreaction and early reaction to the news. On television especially, he said, everything is "a scoop" or "breaking news" even when it's not. He noted that presenting the coverage in such a way leads networks to give news a level of speed and intensity that can sometimes get in the way of facts.
The liberal-leaning "Daily Show" more often than not picks on Fox News and conservative commentators such as Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.
But it also takes satirical jabs at other mainstream media outlets. Recently, it criticized CNN for saying "let's leave it there" during critical parts of an interview and, in another show, made light of nightly news broadcasters getting too excited about having covered the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
At the same time that "The Daily Show" is critiquing the media, it's also establishing itself as a "trusted" news source, even though it doesn't refer to itself as one.
Calling out the media when it takes things out of context, overplays the news
"The Daily Show" often points out when the media doesn't do their job -- such as when host Jon Stewart called out CNBC's Jim Cramer for repeating corporate spin instead of investigating the truth.
"Daily Show" Segment Producer Patrick King said the episode exposing Cramer's contradictions "was less about finding inconsistencies as it was about going at the heart of what that network reports itself to be. It holds itself to be the 'end all, be all' of economic journalism, but when you actually watch it leading up to the recession, you see they were really giving terrible advice based on conventional wisdom on Wall Street."
One of the show's rules is to not trust any source too much until it's been confirmed by another source. The show's 11 writers and eight producers -- who range in age from their early 20s to mid 40s and four of whom are women -- say they often check The New York Times and other newspapers to verify the facts and figures they hear on TV or read about on blogs. They also have a researcher and fact-checker, Adam Chodikoff, who makes sure any information that's used has been verified by multiple sources.
"We work very hard to make sure that we don't take anything out of context," King explained, "just because we like to think at the end of the day that what we're doing is right and correct, but also because while the networks don't respond to us all that much, people attack us and criticize us and we don't want to give them ammunition than they need."
They're not afraid to provide that ammunition, however, if they believe it will make a point. During a 2004 interview on the now-defunct "Crossfire," for instance, Stewart said the show was "hurting America," and that "we need help from the media, and they're hurting us." It's this type of stance on issues that King said he wishes more mainstream journalists would take when interviewing politicians.
Seeing the value in analysis & informed opinion
Too often, King said, journalists' political coverage -- and that of media critics -- ends up being sanitized and nothing but a perfunctory he said/she said exchange. "If you were going to talk about whether the earth is flat, and 99 percent of scientists are saying it's round, and 1 percent are saying it's flat, you wouldn't bring on the 1 percent guy," he said. "That viewpoint is factually inaccurate and they shouldn't bring him on just to give the illusion of balance."
When both sides are represented, writer Elliott Kalan said, there needs to be more fact-checking and deeper questioning: "A senator or governor will be on the news and will say something completely biased, and newscasters won't call them on it. They should be checking these people. Instead they don't want to alienate them and they let them say whatever they want."
He argued that the news media -- and political commentators -- need to look more critically at both sides of an issue, and spend more time breaking down complicated talking points for news consumers. Too often, Kalan said, journalists adhere to neutrality to the point where it paralyzes their ability to ask tough questions and undermines the power of objective, informed opinion.
Kalan described objectivity as having opinions that are pro-facts, and neutrality as meaning you have no stake and no say. "The Daily Show," he said, aims to be objective. And funny.
"The fact is, we are a comedy show, and if it's not funny we're not doing it, no matter how big of an issue it is," King said. "We care really passionately about the things we do, but first and foremost we have to make people laugh."
"I think we have to find a way for well-researched, intelligent programming to become entertaining again," said Hedayati. "Sensationalism may prove just too damn fun to watch, though."
Good article that I may not have seen if you hadn't posted it Snarf, thanks.
Excuse me for trying to contribute meaningfully to the topic at hand....
Copying and pasting isn't "contributing", its using someone elses words to make points you are unable to think of yourself.
Well, then, how about this? Since they call themselves FOX News, they should hold themselves to a certain standard of journalistic principles. A journalist's first obligation is to the TRUTH. By running incorrect footage, they've proven themselves negligent, incompetent, and irresponsible at BEST.
Knutreturns said: Spoken like the true Greatest RDCW Champ!
Excuse me for trying to contribute meaningfully to the topic at hand....
Copying and pasting isn't "contributing", its using someone elses words to make points you are unable to think of yourself.
Well, then, how about this? Since they call themselves FOX News, they should hold themselves to a certain standard of journalistic principles. A journalist's first obligation is to the TRUTH. By running incorrect footage, they've proven themselves negligent, incompetent, and irresponsible at BEST.
This coming from the guy who gets his history lessons from comic books.
Why don't you try stating your opinion of something instead of just following someone elses talking points? Why don't you try thinking for yourself instead of believing something someone said just because you want to be cool?
November 6th, 2012: Americas new Independence Day.
