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And that’s exactly what happened last week. In going after Facebook, many observers forgot about Rupert Murdoch’s empire, whose Fox Business spinoff aired a similarly misleading Pelosi hit job on “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” This was upside down. While newfangled digital manipulations should raise some concern, they are still emerging, long-range threats, and social networks are at least experimenting with ways to mitigate their negative impact on society. But we don’t have much hope nor many good ideas for limiting the lies of old-media outlets like Fox News, which still commands the complete and slavish attention of tens of millions of Americans every night, polluting the public square with big and small lies that often ricochet across every platform, from cable to YouTube to Facebook to Google, drowning us all in a never-ending flood of fakery.
Indeed, what was remarkable about Fox’s Pelosi video was its very ordinariness. Instead of slowing down Pelosi’s speech, Fox Business misleadingly spliced together lots of small sections of a recent news conference to make it look as if Pelosi stammered worse than Porky Pig.
Fox’s editing technique was not novel; this sort of montage is a common feature on Fox and much of cable news. The clip was aired with all the trappings of serious TV journalism. After showing the video, a Fox pundit, Greg Jarrett, and Ed Rollins, the longtime Republican political consultant, concern-trolled about how Pelosi, who “could not put a subject with a predicate in the same sentence,” was “getting worn down” by the demands of her “very big job.”
Pelosi “STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE,” the chyron read.
While Facebook moved quickly to limit the spread of the doctored Pelosi clip, Fox is neither apologizing for airing its montage nor taking it down, because this sort of manipulated video fits within the network’s ethical bounds.
