How a "nonpartisan" website uses deceptive editing to manufacture their spin. With J$P Video!

We stumbled across a provocative item on Wonkette that piqued our curiosity:

Roger Ailes knows more war equals higher ratings, orders anchors to “Sell! Sell! Sell!”

This turned out to be a plug for a bit of propaganda from the happy gang at Think Progress, a left-leaning website which has been accused of playing fast and loose with facts. Their latest claim:

From Hype To Hysteria: Fox News Selling Preemptive War Against Iran
Tomorrow marks the deadline for Iran to comply with U.N. demands to suspend portions of its nuclear program. Fox is using the opportunity to sell another preemptive war. Today Fox has aired multiple segments featuring pundits who claim that a U.S. military attack on Iran is both essential and imminent.

Then follows their "evidence": a clever little video montage that takes a sentence or two from disparate anchors and commentators and edits them so as to prove their point. It begins with an anchor reading a quote from Arnaud de Borchgrave that talks about the likelihood that President Bush would order a military strike on Iran "against the advice of many of his advisers". That doesn't sound like he's saying it is "both essential and imminent". But the TP folks hope you won't notice that.

There is a little meat on the fragile bones: quick clips from Bill Kristol and Gen Burton Moore making the case for such a strike. But TP's claim that the anchors "repeatedly parrot these arguments" is dishonest. Examples:

FOX ANCHOR: And could the Bush administration prepare to launch a massive air strike against Iran’s nuclear sites? This hour we will talk with one expert who says yes.
FOX ANCHOR: And I talked to a guest last hour who said military action could be imminent before Bush leaves office.

The anchor here is referencing her guest Mr de Borchgrave, whom TP would have you believe was insisting that an attack on Iran is "essential". But they don't tell you what he actually said:

De BORCHGRAVE: There are some very powerful voices in the Republican Party, especially the intellectual support of the Republican Party, in the form of the neoconservatives, and also the Christian right, the base, a very large base, who feel that Iran is a mortal menace... The intelligence community, incidentally, believes it won't be until the middle of the next decade before they have a usable nuclear weapon... There are some very important people in the Pentagon who are fearful that [a military strike] is the direction in which it's moving.

Does that sound like Mr De Borchgrave was insisting that an attack is "essential"? And whom was the anchor talking to when she referenced Mr De Borchgrave's comments? Former Middle East Ambassador Dennis Ross, who was making the case not for military action, but for sanctions! Why do you suppose the TP gang quoted Kristol and Moore, but not Ross? For that matter, why did they conveniently omit the interview with Joe Cirincione from the Center for American Progress?

It's not that difficult to create any desired impression by cherry-picking sentence fragments with deceptive editing. As a demonstration of this technique, here's a montage we whipped up in about 30 minutes [QuickTime video]:



See? It's proof! Obviously Roger Ailes ordered Fox to air multiple segments featuring pundits who claim that a U.S. military attack on Iran is both unnecessary and unwise. And Fox anchors repeatedly parroted these arguments.

The reason it's so easy to create dueling montages with such polar opposite slants is because it's the Fox News Channel, where all points of view are heard. Fair and balanced, defined.