CNN called out a major lie of omission that Fox News tried to pull off by editing out key comments from remarks made by President Obama.
Video via Media Matters:
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After playing a clip of Fox News’ outrage, Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter showed viewers what Fox News left out.
STELTER: Here’s what almost everybody missed about the panel discussion. The president was talking about what he called a 40-year effort to stir up class divisions. FOX, of course, has only been around 15 years. Let’s go back to the original video, but let’s let it keep playing, so Obama finishes his thought.
FOX only played this part of the clip once. It was in a news report by Howie Kurtz. Notice that Obama is talking about the whole news media’s responsibility to make sure the middle class and poor Americans know — I’m sorry — what middle class and rich Americans know what it’s like to be poor.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: And that becomes an entire narrative, right, that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical, who’s raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right, but still can’t pay the bills.
And so if we’re going to change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like and how budgets connect to that.
And that’s a — it’s a hard process, because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the nightly news.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STELTER: He called for a broader conversation, but FOX ended up having a very small conversation.
Anyway, that’s “Red News/Blue News” for this week.
It would be nice to think that the media is finally catching on to Fox News’ selective editing tricks, but outside of the cable news competition at CNN and MSNBC, most of the mainstream press doesn’t bother to call out their lies.
If more members of the media would stand up to the Fox News propaganda machine, not only would the news be more trustworthy, viewers would be better informed. The bulk of the press is terrified of Fox News, so they will never directly criticize, debunk, or call out the Republican talking point network.
Brian Stelter of CNN took a few minutes of his show to debunk a major Fox News lie of omission, and if more members of his profession did the same, the Fox News blight could be removed from journalism.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
