Fox News under fire for campaign ad-style anti-Obama video
(CBS News) Fox News is under fire for a campaign ad-style four-minute video highly critical of President Obama, which ran twice on the cable channel's morning program "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday morning.
Co-host Gretchen Carlson introduced the video, saying "let's take a look back" at the president's term with the graphic "looking back at four years of 'change'" on the bottom of the television screen.
The video opens with crowds chanting "O-ba-ma," followed by words on the screen saying "Fox & Friends presents 'Hope and Change.'"
About 30 seconds in, ominous music begins and continues throughout the entire video that is interspersed with Mr. Obama's speeches and dire-sounding news anchors talking about the debt, the economy and the cost of gas.
At the end of the ad, the three co-hosts thank producer Chris White for doing a "great job" and the "tremendous amount of research" put into creating the video.
The video was posted on the Fox News website earlier in the day, but it appears to have been taken down.
Liberal media watch-dog group Media Matters, which is often critical of Fox News, first drew attention to the segment. A blog post that contains the video says, "While Fox & Friends has long been a home for some of the most vicious, misleading, petty, and dishonest attacks on President Obama, they crossed a new ethical line today by producing and airing what is essentially a four-minute anti-Obama attack ad."
Meanwhile, conservative blogger Ed Morrissey did not jump to Fox News' defense, writing in his Hot Air blog: "If anyone wanted to look for evidence that the overall Fox News organization intends to campaign against Obama rather than cover the campaign, this video would be difficult to refute as evidence for that claim."
In response to the controversy, Fox News Executive Vice President of Programming Bill Shine released a statement to TV Newser: "The package that aired on FOX & Friends was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network. This has been addressed with the show's producers."