Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:06 pm
Is Jon Stewart the only man on television willing to hold Fox News accountable? Tonight on The Daily Show, Stewart called out FNC’s Sean Hannity for not only inflating the attendance number from Michele Bachmann’s healthcare protest, but also for trying to pass off footage from the 9/12 protest as evidence of the crowd size. Check out the video.
Here is the video from Media Matters:
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In response to Hannity’s claim that 20,000 people were at the protest, Stewart said, “Anywhere between twenty and forty thousand people or as The Washington Post put it 10,000. The biggest catch was when Stewart caught Hannity using old video from the 9/12 rally.
Stewart said, “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. It’s well attended, but sparse. All of the sudden the trees turn green again, and its cloudy and it looks like thousands and thousands of people of more people arrived. If I didn’t know any better I would think they just put two different days together and acted like they didn’t…It seems Sean Hannity used footage of a bigger crowd from a totally different event to make last week’s GOP healthcare rally appear more heavily attended.”
Why is it that Jon Stewart and The Daily Show seem to be the only people on television who caught Hannity’s bit of trickery? Is Stewart that much brighter than everyone else, or are the other networks not really paying attention? The thing that always strikes me about FNC’s manipulation of video is how amateurish it is.
You would think that with all the resources that Fox News has, they would make a better effort to cover up their deception. If they respected the intelligence of their audience at all, you would think that they would at least make a serious effort to fool them. Instead, they keep providing evidence that they really aren’t all that interested in being a news network. Heck with efforts as poor as this one, they aren’t even a good propaganda machine.
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
