So, Fox news station promptly acknowldeges it was wrong, and then promptly apologizes for it. Cannot ever recall the same being true of all the leftie propaganda that's been spewing from CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN the NYT, the LA Times on any of the millions of times they faked, lied, or presented misleading info as real over the past 20-odd years. Sounds to me like Fox News comes up smelling of roses once again. Which means that Fox News possibly continues as the best single source of news on the planet today. So this headline should read "Fox Quickly Apologizes For Faked Footage."
So... purposefully show fraudulent footage during a story, when you get caught, spend 30 seconds saying you are sorry at the end of a show, and that's somehow supposed to be a positive? Pretty common tactic of playing up lies to a big audience and then giving a quiet little apology that a large % of the people who saw the original will never hear about. All news TV is fucking horrible. It's time to put it to bed.
*shrug* Without hearing all the details, it is hard to get terribly worked up about this. News shows use file footage all the time. You have a jet crash? Trot out file footage of jets taxiing, taking off, and landing. Doing a story on obesity? Dig out the footage of fat guys walking down the sidewalk. Maybe there was stuff going on or the story wasn't big enough to merit a photographer. If the caption said "a tax protest" or something similar and not "yesterday's tax protest", they were a lot less intellectually dishonest than just about every story I've ever seen by the other networks on gun rights. By the way, did ABC ever apologize for that rigged "study" they did a few months back?
Jon Stewart vs. Sean Hannity? Clash of the partisan [-]titans[/-] blowhards! The only real difference between these shamelessly pandering partisans is Jon Stewart used to be funny, clever even. Sean Hannity has always been a hammerhead.
And they're surely less dishonest than Freep, who are saying they "faked" the footage. "Faked" would be building a set and bringing in actors. They used file footage in a less than clear manner. But that doesn't sound as eeeeevil as "faked."
Did the major media outlets ever apologize for faking the footage of a white guy holding an AR15 when Obama was in Phoenix, when the guy was, in fact black? Did they ever apologize for insinuating the black guy was a white supremacist? Did they ever pay Chapelle his royalties?
Haven't heard the mistake was intentional. Infinitely better than the corrections newspapers bury. Heck, I'd be happy if people didn't embrace 24/7 infotainment outlets as gospel.
Faked would be like when that NBC News program decided to show how faulty fuel tanks on pickups could explode when hit from the side. They showed "tests" they conducted with footage of trucks going up in fireballs. It was later revealed that the fuel tanks of the trucks had been "overfilled". That is with gasoline literally spilling out of the caps. And that model rocket engines had been affixed to the fuel tanks and wired to ignite... That said, even "fake" footage can have a legitimate purpose. In the above example, the probability of a massive fuel tank explosion of a pickup was actually only something like 10%. But that is way too dangerous for a vehicle to be allowed on the road. So what was NBC supposed to do? Crash TEN trucks or more just to see if one would explode?
To me, this is not even "faked" footage. It is more like when an F-15E Strike Eagle crashes and the news puts up footage of an F-15E Strike Eagle flying. You know that it is very unlikely the footage they are showing is of the same Strike Eagle that actually crashed. Hell, when doing reports on some historical events (like ancient battles), news programs have been known to show scenes made for movies. The World Book Encyclopedia used to do the same thing to illustrate articles on Julius Ceasar and other ancient leaders.
In a world where a network news organization doesn't bother to investigate a 'leaked' document in order to influence a presidential election and it turns out the 'genuine 1970's memo' had been created in Microsoft Word, this isn't shit. Nice try though. I see Stewart is still desperately trying to be recognized as a journalist rather than a clown.
Well the night before when he was pushing people to go to the rally he promised his viewers that his show would have cameras there and you would see footage tomorrow night... [yt=clickity]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt9mIK4XGiI[/yt] Don't know what is old footage, but all of it is tagged 'Earlier' in the upper left corner: [yt=clickity]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xE6CZe-Ik0[/yt]
Here is the footage from Hannity without Stewart's funny faces or goofy voices. [YT="Earlier..."]jJOsMq00wlw[/YT] Smells like liberal desperation to me. Liberal desperation, for those of you who don't know, smells like a mix of piss, tears and alcohol. But you can't blame them, they are duty-bound to answer the call for Jihad against Fox by their prophet, Barack Obama.
In short, yes. What they did was unethical as hell and they rightly caught tons of flak for it. As your post proves, people still cite that incident when the subject of staged video comes up. You don't do a story and "doctor" it to show the results you were after. If the problem with the trucks really was that bad, then there shouldn't have been a need to monkey with the test parameters. If they crashed X-number of unaltered trucks and didn't get fire and explosions, the problem obviously wasn't as bad as they thought and they should've either scrapped the story or changed its angle to reflect their findings. We do that all the time. We're told that a situation or story exists and many times after we've begun working on it, we'll find that it isn't necessarily the case. At that point, we'll either drop it or change the focus to reflect the new information that we found. The problem with Dateline and other news magazine shows is that they're literally "infotainment". The news departments of the various networks (at least the broadcast networks) have pretty strict "no staging" policies when it comes to video. The news magazines, OTOH, being a blending of news and entertainment, don't often appear to have such policies in place. There's much more money at stake when it comes to the ratings for the magazine shows and, IMHO, they're much more willing to bend or break ethical rules to get what they're after.
Well, only an idiot would think that it was the same plane. Most viewers are sophisticated enough that they realize that the video of the flying F-15 was used for illustrative purposes.
