Consider this.
Mayor de Blasio in New York announced he is closing down several charter schools. These schools are performing better than nearby public schools. Thousands of supporters of the charter schools are rallying this morning to stop the closing of these schools. Fox News ran a segment with video of the thousands of upset, pleading parents, including snippets from some of the speakers.
Then Fox News cut to a panel of two experts for some analysis with the news anchor. Sometimes the experts in these panels sort out for and against the news subject, sometimes they’re both in favor or both against. In this case, they were both critical of de Blasio’s action, both in favor of the charter schools.
Here’s the rub – during the analysis segment when the screen showed head shots of the screen anchor and the two experts, the tag line on the screen underneath the panel read in part, “de Blasio rallies against charter schools.” For the rest of that news subject, the producers did not cut back to video from the rally.
Now, de Blasio wasn’t at the rally they’d just shown pictures from that contained thousands of people who were all in favor of charter schools. The propaganda effect from the tag line’s misrepresentation was to aggrandize de Blasio by falsely assigning the rally images just seen to him, and confuse the impact of the news analysis portion of the segment. Leftists would call this a win/win.
People who came late to the news report, who did not see the video from the rally or hear the sound clips from some of the rally speakers, saw a confused news presentation where the content the panel speakers delivered did not reconcile with the report of a de Blasio rally that never occurred.
Was this some news editor’s attempt to be clever that ended up taking down the impact of the entire segment? Or was this a deliberate misrepresentation intended to undermine the agreement and conclusions of the news panel that were in favor of charter schools and against de Blasio?
Understanding how the Left works, my money is on the latter explanation.
We’re surrounded by this sort of thing in the media. You cannot just absorb program content – audio, visual, or the interplay between the two – without putting it through a critical filter. And Fox News is, sadly, not exempt.