Fox News to Fire Itself
Fox News is considering "serious disciplinary action" against the staffer responsible for passing off old campaign footage of Sarah Palin addressing adoring crowds as shots from her current book tour. So that's a bad thing, then?
The snafu happened yesterday on Happening Now: Fox showed footage of Palin at campaign rallies that happened last year while anchor Gregg Jarrett claimed that Palin is "continuing to draw huge crowds while she's promoting her brand new book," citing "pictures just coming into us" as evidence. Sean Hannity was caught pulling the identical trick last week, showing old tea party footage while talking about the huge crowds drawn to a recent anti-healthcare protest.
But Fox News doesn't take these things lightly! The Chicago Tribune's Mark Silva reports that "news executives there consider this to have been a sloppy and unnecessary error," and intend to discipline whoever is responsible. Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente told Silva that it was a "production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video."
OK, then. Pack up your office, everybody who works at Fox News. You're fired.