Fox News Apologizes For Rep. Paul Screw-up: Does Fox's Zero Tolerance Policy Exist?
Written by Eric Hananoki
Published
During today's America's Newsroom, host Bill Hemmer apologized for an “honest mistake” in airing a clip of CPAC's audience audibly booing Rep. Ron Paul winning the conference's straw poll. The footage America's Newsroom aired was actually from 2010, and this year, the audience's reaction contained cheers.
Whether or not Fox News made an “honest mistake” is something only people in the control room know for sure. But we do know that Fox News - on both their opinion and “news” sides - has a history of deceptive video “mistakes” like this.
In 2009, for instance, Fox News had to apologize for airing old campaign footage to make it appear that Palin is getting “huge crowds” on her book tour. The network also apologized for presenting a deceptively cropped six-month-old clip of Vice President Joe Biden as new. And perhaps most famously, Jon Stewart noted that Sean Hannity aired an incorrect video to present Rep. Michele Bachmann's health care rally as bigger than it actually was.
That's only some of the deceptive and switched footage Fox News has done in the past few years. But it's worth remembering that Fox News executives claimed in 2009 after their Palin footage screw-up that they are instituting a "zero tolerance" policy for on-screen errors. Since then, as Media Matters noted, Fox News has repeatedly refused to correct their "mistakes."