MEDIA MATTERS May 30, 2012 9:26 am ET by Justin Berrier
and other sources
While Fox & Friends has long been a home for some of the most vicious, misleading, petty, and dishonest attacks on President Obama, they crossed a new ethical line today by producing and airing what is essentially a four-minute anti-Obama attack ad.
“Fox and Friends” aired a remarkable four-minute video on its Wednesday show.
“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 asked at one point, introducing the video.
In the video —which is labeled as a “Fox and Friends Presents” production — viewers see images of Obama talking about jobs contrasted with footage of homeless people. There is dark, foreboding music, and statistics about the unemployment rate, the rise in the number of food stamps, and the national debt, among other things.
The hosts heaped lavish praise on the producer of the video saying that it had taken a “tremendous amount of research” to put together.
The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik denounced it, calling it reminiscent of “1930s propaganda” “Even I am shocked by how blatantly Fox is throwing off any pretense of being a journalistic entity with videos like this.”
Conservative Hot Air’s Ed Morrisey said that it didn’t seem like something a news organization should be producing.
“What sort of change have we really seen over the past four years from the Obama administration?” co-host Steve Doocy asked by way of introduction.
Bill Shine, executive vice president for programming at Fox News:
“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. This has been addressed with the show’s producers.”