On Wednesday, ‘Fox and Friends’ aired a video lasting four minutes. The video was dubbed as being a ‘look back’ at the four years in officer for President Barack Obama but it could be viewed as an attack ad from Republicans. The video was shown more than once during the show on Wednesday but Fox News issued a statement that blamed it on an associate producer.
“We decided to take a look back at the president’s first term to see if it lived up to hope and change,” host Gretchen Carlson said when she introduced the video.
Viewers saw images of Obama discussing jobs while also contrasted with footage of homeless people. The music in the video is ominous and statistics regarding unemployment, food stamps and the national debt are visible. The hosts of the show praised the producer of the video by saying that it must have taken a “tremendous amount of research” to create.
The executive vice president of programming for Fox News, Bill Shine, released a statement regarding the video this week. The statement is as follows:
“The package that aired on ‘Fox & Friends’ was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network,” Shine said. “This has been addressed with the show’s producers.”
Fox News also confirmed that the video was removed from the network’s aggregation site and the main website.
David Zurawik, a media critic with the Baltimore Sun, said the following about the video:
“As the guy who challenged the Obama administration two years when it tried to deny Fox News access to interviews and other opportunities offered to the media on the grounds that Fox was not a legitimate news operation, I have to tell you even I am shocked by how blatantly Fox is throwing off any pretense of being a journalistic entity with videos like this. Don’t be fooled by Bret Baier’s Boy Scout smile or all the talk about how some shows are news and some are opinion on the channel. Any news organization that puts up this kind of video is rotten to the core.”
Ed Morrisey, from Hot Air, said the following:
“I know the initial response will be that other news organizations offer biased perspectives and hagiographies of Obama that go well beyond a single video … and that response is entirely valid. However, we usually criticize that kind of behavior with other news organizations, too. If anyone wanted to look for evidence that the overall Fox News organization intends to campaign against Obama rather than cover the campaign, this video would be difficult to refute as evidence for that claim.”
