Friday, May 24, 2019

NO, FOX & FRIENDS DID NOT DO "THE RIGHT THING"

Mediaite reports:
Fox & Friends did the right thing Friday morning in swiftly correcting the record after Fox Nation hosts and frequent Fox News guests Diamond & Silk made remarkably disparaging remarks about Speaker Nancy Pelosi....

Co-host Steve Doocy ... not[ed] that Trump has finally given Pelosi a nickname, “calling her Crazy Nancy.”

Lynnette “Diamond Hardaway” answered with “Well, listen, we are all questioning her mental capacity.” Rochelle “Silk” Richardson followed up with “She always looks like she is a nonfunctioning alcoholic and she slurs her words and rambling over her words. What I don’t understand this lady is almost 80 years old, one of the most powerful women in the world.”
Or as Contemptor's Gary Legum put it:
Fox News “personalities” Diamond & Silk forced Fox & Friends into a rare correction Friday morning.

... they launched a couple of smears of Pelosi that appear to be based on a video that was deceptively edited to make it appear the Speaker was slurring her words and couldn’t speak in complete sentences.

“She can’t even form a complete sentence without looking perplexed and confused,” said Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway, to a rousing “Uh-huh” of agreement from Rochelle “Silk” Richardson.
Here's the segment:



First of all, it's obvious that Doocy fed Diamond & Silk the reference to "Crazy Nancy" so they could talk about the video, and about how drunk and unstable Pelosi allegedly looked. They were allowed to go on at great length about this.

Contemptor's Legum picks up the story:
Sometime after the segment ended, Doocy issued a correction. Having not known what Diamond and Silk were talking about with Pelosi, he looked on FoxNews.com and read the headline of a story there to the audience...
Here's what Doocy said:
During the Diamond and Silk segment they mentioned Nancy Pelosi. I was unfamiliar with what they were talking about. I’m looking at FoxNews.com. There's a story: ”Manipulated videos of Nancy Pelosi edited to falsely depict her as drunk spread on social media. And according to a report from The Washington Post, experts believe the original video was slowed down to 75% from the original and that her pitch was also manipulated in order to present her under the influence." Not a real video. It’s doctored.



Oh, please. Fox & Friends did not do "the right thing" in this case, and it was not "forced ... into a rare correction."

To believe that, you have to believe that none of the hosts went into this morning's show aware of the debunking of this videos, which was a huge story last night and into this morning. How plausible is that? These people are deceivers, but they're not idiots. They knew the video was fake, but they also know this kind of thing is catnip to their audience. They were determined to put out a segment taking it seriously, but left that job to rodeo clowns Diamond & Silk. Then, after a while, there was Doocy saying he's shocked, shocked, that it's a put-up job -- thus assuaging the fears of all those mainstream advertisers who don't want to put their product son Fox if they think it's turning into InfoWars.

This is good cop/bad cop. It's not Fox being responsible.

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