Fox and Friends presented a video they claimed showed that a man attacking "peaceful tea party protesters." You can watch their take here:
However, not only did Fox and Friends start the clip at a misleading time, they actually zoomed in to hide a full shot of the tussle, which shows the tea partier pushing the guy they claim was an attacker.
Here's their zoomed in shot:
And here's the actual video of how the tussle started:
As Media Matters reported, the conservative activist Fox claims is a victim was actually charged with assault in this case. Of course, Fox and Friends neglected to mention that fact.
And here's a quote from the conservative activist, Nathan Tabor, in an interview on Stage Right (at the 14:15 mark):
My local paper, who ignored the North Carolina GOP convention...calls me and says, "Hey Nathan, if you freeze this at such and such, your hand was at this guy's face, and his head's kinda going back, are you sure you didn't hit him first?...The liberal media, after watching the full, raw, unedited video, a 17-minute video clip and an 11 minute video clip from two different angles, they saw the hate and vile coming from this man's mouth about George W. Bush and Cheney [editor's note: gasp! the humanity!], they saw his foul language towards me and my family, heard my comments which were very civil and had the audacity to ask me if I had hit him first.
In other words, both the police and the local media, who had access to the full, unedited tapes, concluded that Tabor was equally culpable (if not more culpable if he in fact started the fight). But Fox just crops the video to hide the fact that Tabor started pushing first.
"Fair and Balanced" in action again.
Cross-posted at the St. Louis Activist Hub blog.
Update: Sorry, some people mentioned that the 4-second version of the video isn't very clear. I'd been posting much more (including the full videos) back on my home blog, so didn't realize that it wasn't clear by itself. Anyway, you can see the full clip here:
You can also see the full tea party spin video from two different angles here.I should also note that I'm not condoning punching the guy, just pointing out that Fox news presented the info in a misleading manner.