Fox News' "Madison Protest" Footage Aims to Deceive

On February 28, the O'Reilly Factor aired a video news segment by Fox Channel reporter Mike Tobin, who was shown reporting from inside the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. "News" footage aired during his broadcast of goings-on outside the capitol depicts an angry, out-of-control, crowd of pro-union protesters yelling and pushing people around. But the protesters in the video are wearing shirtsleeves and standing on a street lined with tall palm trees and other green, leafy foliage -- and that is absolutely not February in Madison, where no palm trees live outside of greenhouses and where temperatures have been well below freezing for most of the winter. Fox clearly used out-of-town footage to depict the "violence" it is hyping as happening in Madison. The segment is two minutes, nine seconds long, and the palm tree footage occurs at the 1:42 mark, as wording on the screen says "Union Protests."

Comments

Balanced and Fair my a** . . . propaganda and speculation pure and simple. Reporting - not hardly! Are their viewers idiots or do they just have no respect for their viewers intelligence?

The viewership of Fox is being handed exactly what they want. Let's look at the truth of Fox News and its viewership. The "conservatives" couldn't keep their slaves because the "liberals" won the civil war and that is what is behind Fox News and the kind of people who watch it.

Maybe you should bone up on your history you un-educated piece of trash. Lincoln (President) helped start the Republican party(conservatives) while Steven Dougless and his cronies were trying to push slavery on the north(Democrats) before you go and make outrageous statements about well documented history pick up a book, unless your illiterate, in which case there is audio sources.... NO EXCUSE!

I don't think there is anyone disputing the fact the Lincoln was the leader of the newly powerful Republican party 150 years ago or that those Republicans were radically liberal in their determination to pass constitutional amendments to secure equality for all men regardless of race. And there is no dispute that the Democratic party of the South at that time was backing secession and slavery (and, as a matter of historical literacy, Stephen Douglas (not to be confused with the great African American opponent of slavery, Frederick Douglass) was a northern Dem who supported the deplorable Dred Scott decision on "state's rights" grounds).

Those historical facts belie the modern reality of how the parties have changed over the last century and a half. President Lincoln, who leapt from a window to try to block a bill in the statehouse, before becoming president, may well have admired the efforts of modern Dems to break a quorum needed for the modern Rs to destroy labor rights. Afterall, it was Lincoln who in his state of the union address 150 years ago said this:

"In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

But I bet your FOXy "analysts" and TP buddies never mentioned that to you.

Dare I mention your run-on sentence? This seems to be a pattern with the right. Call names, never listen. What are you afraid of not-so-Well-Read? Sure, your identity is wrapped up in being a tea bagger, but consider for a moment the possibility that you are being duped, that everything you are being told by Fox News has an ulterior motive. You are the soldier and it would appear you don't even get what you are fighting for. Do you really think the king cares about you? Do you really think you are any more than cannon fodder in the class war? Life is frustrating. Life is brutal sometimes. Don't hate your neighbor. He has no power to hurt you. Hate the person with his filthy foot on your neck, his filthy hand in your pocket and his filthy smokestack in your air. See your neighbor protesting that foot? That hand? That smokestack? Sign a petition, pick up a sign, and join in. We welcome you.

The palm tree video proves that Fox News did in fact lie about the protest at the capital in Wisconsin.

They were depicting union behavior in general with the clips...They never said they (the clips) were in Wisconsin but were clips from around the country...Their reporter was clearly in Madison...Are you guys that slow?...

I think you are intelligent enough to recognize that Fox intentionally slipped in that scene of an unruly shoving match (who knows the true circumstances of that scene, were they even labor union supporters?). Worse to me is the way Bill O'Reilly shapes the viewpoint & tries to make the entire event look like it isn't grass roots in nature. Also, the reporter twice says something like "they all think alike", again in attempt to shape the viewer's opinion. I would like to see a more objective report on what is going on there, but I do not trust Fox to ever do that. Do you?

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