Michigan Punch-fest: ANOTHER Jame's O'Keefe-style Lie on Fox

There appears to be some problems with the right wing narrative that so loves to portray them as poor pitiful victims when they are not.

Deceptive editing is different from selective editing.

The right has adopted an immoral and unethical willingness to lie, to engage in deceptive practices, to fake, and to engage in agent provocateur set ups they initiate, including pretending to be part of a group they are not.  This ranges from people infiltrating and then behaving disruptively or badly as part of a group to which they do not actually belong, as occurred with the Occupy events, in an attempt to discredit people behaving properly, to other activities like running Republican candidates as fake Democrats in order to disrupt Democratic primaries.  It is part of their larger unethical conduct with election tampering that misled people on where their polling place was, on when elections were scheduled, on how to vote absentee, and phone banking calls and robo calls dis informing (deliberate deception as a tactic) as distinct from misinforming people that they had voted by signing recall and other petitions.  The right is not a 'values' party at all, but they have to wrap themselves in that label to hide how value-less they really are, the way they wrap themselves in the flag to hide their true agendas.

The GOP in desperation, and it's media arm Faux news, have no moral or ethical boundaries as they become more and more desperate with their well-deserved losses.  The public is catching on, and the public doesn't like being lied to, or the right wing liars.  Extensive public fact checking has been broadly considered to be one of the reasons Romney/Ryan lost so very badly.  The facts were not on their side, their ideas were not good, but they became much less persuasive when shown up as serial liars and flip floppers who would say anything they didn't mean to anyone to try to win.

The right has a severe credibility problem.  Incidents like the one below do not help them.  When facts are not their friend, when the right does not get their way by fair means, they resort to foul means and the right also resorts to violence.

For example. in the Michigan kerfuffle, Fox News deliberately misled and deceived their viewers. Selective editing is different from editing to deceive.

But more than that, the whole story, as we noted yesterday, of unions collapsing a tent as some sort of out of control thuggish behavior is a lie.  The Americans for Prosperity collapsed their own tent, in the kind of conduct which is attributed to agent provocateurs.  It was union protesters who HELPED get people out of the collapsed tent, which showed more care for the people under the tent than their own colleagues bothered to show.  Because it appears that the individuals who ACTUALLY collapsed the tent may have been caught on cell phone video, and because the AFP stunt has been reported to law enforcement, I can only hope that surveillance footage and other camera and phone footage will show the truth, including images which we can only hope will identify the real perpetrator.



Here is the story from Salon:

Fox News revealed selective editing of punched Fox News contributor

Video of Steven Crowder getting punched is being used as evidence of union thuggery, but who got hit first? VIDEO

By Jillian Rayfield
(Credit: YouTube/StevenCrowder)

A video of Fox News contributor Steven Crowder getting punched by a Michigan union protester was selectively edited, and that editing was revealed during Crowder’s appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News.
The original video shows Crowder getting punched by a protester on Tuesday while Crowder was trying to stop an Americans For Prosperity tent from being torn down. The video, which is approaching a million views on YouTube, was picked up by the right as evidence of “union thuggery”:

Katie Pavlich @KatiePavlich

Note to union thugs: don't punch new media people or threaten to kill them. Smile, you're on camera! ow.ly/g19uC

11 Dec 12

Monica Crowley @MonicaCrowley

My pal @scrowder survives attempted union beatdown in MI. This is the Left. Violent & outrageous, but not a big mystery. It's who they are.

11 Dec 12

Michelle Malkin

• ✔

@michellemalkin

Oh dear Lord. Did you see vid of @scrowder assaulted by bloodlusting union mob as he tried to protect AFP tent? youtu.be/u_F3oev06i0

11 Dec 12

But on Wednesday, Eclectablog’s Chris Savage argued that Crowder’s video “actually a composite of things that happened over the course of the day, many of them hours apart.”

Crowder defended himself on Twitter:

Steven Crowder

• ✔

@scrowder

All editing is selective by definition. Try the hours of raw footage all over the net. RT @aus_cull: @scrowder SELECTIVE EDITING. #dirtbag

12 Dec 12

He added that the full footage was shown on Sean Hannity’s show the night before.
As Robert Mackey of the New York Times’ Lede Blog points out:

Unfortunately for Mr. Crowder, a look at the video broadcast on the Sean Hannity show appears to show quite clearly that he left out an important section of the footage when he put together his edit. A section of the Fox News broadcast preserved by the Web site Mediaite shows that Mr. Hannity’s producers at Fox News started the clip five seconds earlier than Mr. Crowder did. What the extra footage reveals is the man who punched Mr. Crowder being knocked to the ground seconds before and then getting up and taking a swing at the comedian. (my emphasis added - DG)

Mackey adds that there’s another problem: “The still frame he used for the clip’s title image on YouTube, which offers a much clearer image of the man punching him, was obviously shot by a second camera, from an entirely different angle than the rest of the footage he presented of the man hitting him.”
Here’s the original video:



And here’s the video from Hannity, via Mediaite:

Jillian Rayfield is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on politics. Follow her on Twitter at @jillrayfield or email her at jrayfield@salon.com. More Jillian Rayfield.