Video footage manipulation[edit]
Jon Stewart reported on his November 10, 2009, broadcast of
The Daily Show that Fox News pundit
Sean Hannity misrepresented video footage purportedly showing large crowds on a health-care protest orchestrated by Rep.
Michele Bachmann. Stewart showed inconsistencies in alternating shots according to the color of the sky and tree leaves, showing that spliced in the shots was footage from Glenn Beck's much larger
9/12 rally which had occurred two months earlier. Hannity estimated 20,000 protesters were in attendance, the
Washington Post estimated 10,000 and
Luke Russert reported that three
Capitol Hill police officers guessed "about 4,000."
[106][107] Sean Hannity apologized to his viewers for the error during his November 11, 2009 broadcast.
[108] Stewart also has periodically accused Fox of playing video footage out of context, such as when Sean Hannity played footage of Obama stating the
DREAM Act could not be passed by executive order to make the president seem
hypocritical even though when the footage is continued Obama goes on to clarify that the president does have the authority to halt deportations.
[109]
On November 18, 2009, Fox News anchor
Gregg Jarrett told viewers that a
Sarah Palin book signing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had a massive turnout while showing footage of Palin with a large crowd. Jarrett noted that the former Republican vice-presidential candidate is "continuing to draw huge crowds while she's promoting her brand-new book", adding that the images being shown were "some of the pictures just coming in to us.... The lines earlier had formed this morning."
[110] The video was actually taken from a 2008 McCain/Palin campaign rally. Fox senior vice-president of news Michael Clemente issued an initial statement saying, "This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video."
[110] Fox offered an on-air apology the following day during the same "Happening Now" segment citing regrets for what they described as a "video error" with no intent to mislead
Content analysis studies[edit]
The Project on Excellence in Journalism report in 2006 showed that 68 percent of Fox cable stories contained personal opinions, as compared to MSNBC at 27 percent and CNN at 4 percent. The "content analysis" portion of their 2005 report also concluded that "Fox was measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox journalists were more opinionated on the air."
[44]
A 2006 University of California, Berkeley study cited that there was a correlation between the presence of the Fox News Channel in cable markets and increases in Republican votes in those markets.
[
Tests of knowledge of Fox viewers[edit]
A study by the
Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the
University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, as published in the Winter 03-04 issue of the
Political Science Quarterly,
[60] reported that poll-based findings
[61] indicated that viewers of Fox News, the
Fox Broadcasting Company and local Fox affiliates were more likely than viewers of other news networks to hold three misperceptions:
[60]
- The belief that "The U.S. has found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq" was held by 33% of Fox viewers and only 23% of CBS viewers, 19% for ABC, 20% for NBC, 20% for CNN and 11% for NPR/PBS.
- 35% of Fox viewers believed that "the majority of people [in the world] favor the U.S. having gone to war" with Iraq (compared with 28% for CBS, 27% for ABC, 24% for CNN, 20% for NBC, 5% for NPR/PBS).
Fox News Channel controversies - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
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