Sean Hannity apologized to Comedy Central news analyst (what else can I call him?) Jon Stewart last night after Stewart busted him using doctored footage to make an anti-medical care rally seem bigger than it was.
Sorry, Sean. I don’t buy it. It’s pretty hard…no…impossible to “inadvertently” used footage from a September rally and claim it was from a rally last week. Come on. What kind of saps do you think we are?
Footage in a studio is filed by topic and date. To get to a September rally, you have to enter terms that link to that.You were reporting on a rally in November. The two don’t mistakenly get aired. That is simply ridiculous and impossible for a reasonable person to believe.
If you believe that Dan Rather should have been fired for reporting news from an unverified source regarding George W. Bush’s military service, then you certainly must think that Hannity and whomever is responsible should be fired. This was clearly tampering with the news for editorial purposes.
Watch his smarmy apology here.
No more whining from the ignorant, please, about the Comedy Channel not being a valid news source. In this case, it was far more truthful and accurate than Fox, or Faux News.
And while liberals are having a field day: how about that Carrie Prejean masturbation tape? She admitted to that on Hannity yesterday, although painted herself as a victim. Prejean was the Miss California who disparaged gay marriage in a televised pageant and then was stripped of her crown for not showing up for events.
She sued the pageant and settled with it after the release of a tape she made for her boyfriend featuring her in a solo sexual act. Don’t you love when the real values emerge from the cloak of so-called family values. PS: Hannity wrote the forward to her book.
As much as I disagree with her, making a video for a boyfriend doesn’t strike me as being at odds with being for marriage discrimination. I haven’t been paying much attention to her, but I guess the only thing that would make the tape hypocritical is if she was speaking out against premarital sex.
It was a dumb mistake, but mistake, I believe. Can’t tell you how many times wrong pictures are published in the newspaper (Merc News) and an apology is published as well as footage on the cable news networks. Still dumb after the “fight” with the white house. Hope you look at the other networks under the microscope for errors as well.
I’m not sure it’s true that Comedy Central is a “news ‘source'” as in a true journalistic enterprise with paid reporters on staff to investigate stories and so on. So I can’t agree it’s a “valid news source” because it’s not one at all. That said, it DOES, nevertheless, offer valid news criticism. This is just one example of it. Stewart’s “Glenn Beck sendup” the other night was another example of it.
As for Hannity’s non-apology apology … there’s nothing new about that sort of thing. The non-apology apology has been raised to an artform over the last several years. He’s hardly the only public figure to engage in it, and will not be the last.