{"id":1291,"date":"2009-11-12T09:52:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-12T13:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/11\/12\/hannity-agonistes\/"},"modified":"2009-11-12T09:52:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-12T13:52:00","slug":"hannity-agonistes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/11\/12\/hannity-agonistes\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannity agonistes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

The backyard relevance here is that Fox played an instrumental role in elevating Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 race.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Hannity’s program spliced video of much larger crowds at an earlier event<\/a> into his coverage of the GOP event.<\/p>\n

Hannity later acknowledged that Stewart “was right.” According to Hannity<\/a>, it was an “inadvertent mistake but a mistake nonetheless.”<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to the Fox News problem.<\/p>\n

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

That kind of activism has always been a respected part of journalism. Some of my favorite magazines and newspapers have a distinctly conservative bent. <\/p>\n

What troubles me is that Fox — an incredibly powerful media organization — would intentionally deceive its audience.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week brought what may be one of the starkest moments yet in America’s appraisal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}