Hannity agonistes

This week brought what may be one of the starkest moments yet in America’s appraisal (reappraisal?) of Fox News and its role in our national political conversation.

The backyard relevance here is that Fox played an instrumental role in elevating Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 race.

The network also helped mightily in driving Republican Dede Scozzafava out of the contest. In doing so, Fox clearly slanted Scozzafava’s record and repeated inaccurate information.

On his Daily Show program this week, Jon Stewart pointed out a clear case of deception in Sean Hannity’s coverage of a recent Republican rally in Washington.

Hannity’s program spliced video of much larger crowds at an earlier event into his coverage of the GOP event.

Hannity later acknowledged that Stewart “was right.” According to Hannity, it was an “inadvertent mistake but a mistake nonetheless.”

I’ll be blunt: Hannity’s claim is implausible. Somehow video of a much larger event months earlier was accidentally spliced into a report?

It just doesn’t wash. Clearly, Hannity’s team wanted to inflate the importance and popularity of the GOP rally, even if that meant deceiving audiences.

Which brings me to the Fox News problem.

I don’t mind Fox serving as an advocacy news organization, pushing a particular (in this case, conservative) agenda.

That kind of activism has always been a respected part of journalism. Some of my favorite magazines and newspapers have a distinctly conservative bent.

What troubles me is that Fox — an incredibly powerful media organization — would intentionally deceive its audience.

We’ve seen it before. In the NY-23 race, Fox hosts told audiences over and over again that Scozzafava was “endorsed by ACORN.” That simply wasn’t true.

These days, consumers of news have to be far more savvy than ever before. When watching Fox, I suggest turning up your skepticism-filter as high as it will go.