FOX: Spinning the Truth, Again

From Jed Lewison at Daily Kos:

Here’s video of Fox’s Chris Wallace and Karl Rove playing what they claimed to be a DNC ad criticizing Rove, along with the actual, unedited ad from the DNC:

As you can see, Wallace spliced out 15 seconds from the middle of the ad without disclosing or indicating that it had been edited. Wallace and Rove then went on to discuss the ad with Karl Rove as if they had just played the full thing, even though some of the toughest criticism of Rove (including the firing of U.S. attorneys and the outing of a CIA agent) had been removed from the ad they aired.

It’s common practice to use excerpts from ads, but when an ad is spliced together, news organizations should make it clear to their audience that the ad has been edited. They can offer verbal, textual, or visual indications of the edits, but in this case, the ad was presented as if it hadn’t been tampered with at all.

But the ad had been edited, and by treating it as if it were the full actual ad Wallace violated every journalistic principle that there is, which should serve as a reminder that nothing on Fox is real journalism. It’s all conservative propaganda.

The segment with Wallace and Rove was broadcast by Fox on Sunday, March 29.