The video: Fox News is facing a firestorm of criticism over an overtly anti-Obama video that aired Wednesday on Fox & Friends, the "fair and balanced" cable channel's morning show. The hosts proudly introduced the slick four-minute clip (watch it below) as "a look back at the president's first term to see if it lived up to 'Hope and Change'." The video opens with crowds cheering the Democratic candidate in 2008 as he promises a brighter future and a smaller deficit. Then the music turns foreboding, and an infographic compares the national debt "then" ($10 trillion) and "now" ($15 trillion). The video darkly makes the case that Obama's "change" led to higher unemployment, spiking gas prices, and more. Fox quickly pulled the video from its websites. Bill Shine, Fox News executive vice president of programming, issued a statement saying that it was the work of an associate producer "and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network."
The reaction: "So much for 'Fair and Balanced,'" says Dylan Byers at Politico. Fox News has aired plenty of "blatantly conservative programming" while claiming it's non-partisan, but this time, it really crossed the line. "It's kind of impossible to see how you walk this one back." Usually, it's liberal news outlets that show their bias with "hagiographies of Obama," says Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. Fox really blew it by going down that same road. This proves that "the overall Fox News organization intends to campaign against Obama rather than cover the campaign." Fox News chief Roger Ailes is facing "a moment of truth," says Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast. Either he denounces the "attack ad" unequivocally, and makes it clear "that such partisan garbage has no place on Fox News," or he'll prove Fox really is the right-wing propaganda machine critics always said it was. Watch the video for yourself:
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