Not a Good Week For FOX News

The 9/12 protest /Tea Party (whatever you want to call it) has been garnering as always a lot of media attention and public debate. The event itself fosters a whole slew of descriptive adjectives in my mind but that is not what this post it about...I wanted to bring your attention to the media feud that began as a result of several networks' coverage of this event...and wow it is not pretty.

So the play by play is this: FOX news takes out an ad in two newspapers Friday that falsely accuses its competitors of not covering the protests.

CNN then fires back with an ad that they are now currently running on their station with the tag line, "FOX news Distorting not Reporting" (See below)

And just to clear their name and point out the absurdity of the whole situation Rick Sanchez takes FOX to task for the ad in his show, pointing out that not only did CNN cover the event very thoroughly, but the image FOX used in the ad claiming CNN did not cover the event, was in fact stolen from CNN. Who at FOX approved that ad before it ran in the papers?!? (check out Rick Sanchez below).


Rick Sanchez sums up his point by saying that indeed CNN did cover the event but they did not promote the event like FOX did. And as if FOX was trying to back this claim up themselves, a video surfaced on the web that caught a FOX producer rallying the crowds behind their cameras. Look for the girl in the green on her phone make hand gestures to the crowd...

Many blogs and media analysts have been saying that this producer, Heidi Noonan, crossed a journalistic line by trying to alter the scene of the protest..well I'd have to agree.

In order to report unbiased news coverage, the journalist’s job is not to create the news but to simply document it. If the crowd was not that enthusiastic, then it should have been covered that way. Trying to alter the scene in a manner that portrays a different mood to the viewer than was actually the reality that day is not the job of the journalist. In fact, in my book that would be inaccurate reporting. This is the kind of thing that happens for tapings of live television reality shows and game shows when the producer tries to rile up the crowd right before they go back on air from a commercial break. If FOX wants to do this then they cannot call themselves a news organization…they might as well also hold up cue cards that say “applaud” and “louder”. Would it be any less appropriate for a producer to arrive at the scene of a shooting or murder and tell the onlookers that they needed to be crying more or appear more somber? It’s simply not appropriate for anyone involved in honest journalism to play the puppeteer of the news and try to create false emotions for the purpose of proving a point (especially a highly controversial political point), or to try and create more dramatic and compelling video

FOX you screwed up big time. CNN you're not great either so don't get too cocky.