Fox News recently attempted to skew Ron Paul's second consecutive CPAC straw poll win by deceptively using footage from last year's CPAC event to represent the 2011 CPAC straw poll results. In last year's footage, Mitt Romney's supporters booed the poll result, which announced Ron Paul as the winner. Ron Paul's supporters were largely absent from the audience that day because of a Campaign for Liberty meeting running late.
So, Fox used the 2010 footage of a booing crowd, making it look like Ron Paul was getting booed again in 2011. They based their entire news "story" on the premise that Ron Paul got booed. When some people noticed what had happened, Fox News' defense was:
"During a live introduction of Congressman Ron Paul on Tuesday, America's Newsroom incorrectly aired a clip from the 2010 CPAC event in Washington rather than this year's event. It was clearly a mistake, we used the wrong video tape...It's an honest mistake. We apologize for the error. We look forward to having Representative Paul back on our program very soon."
As a well-known and professional news source, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that Fox couldn't distinguish between last year's footage and this year's. As I said, their entire news piece was based on Ron Paul getting booed, so they had to purposefully dig up the clip and create a story based off of it. Even small television stations have fact checkers and editors whose job it is to make sure mistakes like this don't happen.
This "mistake" would also be more plausible if Fox didn't already have a history of smearing and dismissing Paul and making him appear irrelevant and crazy. It seems they would much prefer for Paul to disappear. Here are a few examples:
- Fox News omitted Paul's name entirely from a survey last week that asked who would make the best president. Relative nobodies like John Thune and Jon Huntsman were included in the Fox poll, and yet Paul was blacklisted entirely despite his CPAC success two years running.
- During the 2008 presidential campaign, Fox news denigrated the fact that Ron Paul received the most campaign donations from members of the U.S. military by attributing it to "libertarian mailing lists"
- In January 2008, Fox excluded Paul from a presidential forum event, because they saw the prospect of anti-war opinions being voiced by the most conservative member of the House a "threat"
- In 2007, Fox News claimed their presidential poll, which Paul won, was unreliable because online Paul supporters had skewed the result, despite the fact that the survey was conducted via cell phone text messaging and no online votes were taken.
- Before the 2008 presidential campaign, Fox News was caught on several occasions editing Paul's name out of Associated Press news stories they syndicated. (For example, on Jan. 3, 2008 Fox News published an AP story with this line: "Only Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter have passed through since September." This is what the original AP story actually said: "Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter and Ron Paul have passed through since September." Other news sources ran the same story, but Paul's name was only omitted in Fox's version.)
