One of the things that news stations are supposed to do is that you're not supposed to use bogus
pictures or video reports.
And Fox News has been caught doing exactly that.
This has to do with the Seattle Capitol Hill autonomous zone abbreviated or of the acronym
is Char's S.H.
Azy, which has sort of formed in the aftermath of the nationwide protests of late.
And this is one of the clearest and most undeniable violations of just basic journalistic ethical
standards that you can imagine.
On Friday, they were, of course, running stories constantly on their Web site about the chads.
This is an area near Seattle's Capitol Hill where protesters took over a few blocks after
police left the area.
And for much of the day, Fox News's Web site was running pictures of a guy with a long
gun, some kind of protective vest, a beanie and a green mask standing in front of an old
navy with the window smashed out.
Now, this was a completely fabricated what we would call a collage image.
This scene that
was pictured on the Fox News Web site didn't happen.
It was a combination of a Getty image photo of a guy with a gun who was at the process
protest zone on June 10th, meaning last Wednesday with an image from last month of a smashed
window.
And the entire collage was completely and totally fake.
Now, this wasn't just one fake image they used.
Another one had the same gunman with the green mask, with the long gun appearing to stand
at the start of the chars, sort of placing him almost like he was an armed sentry to
that area.
Now, think what you want about the Char's.
The guy in the green mask was not actually doing what the pictures suggested he was doing.
It was totally and completely fake.
These were doctored images when The Seattle Times told Fox News.
Fox News quietly pulled the
pictures when they were pressed by e-mail, they said, We have replaced our photo illustration
with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered store front, both of which
were taken this week in Seattle's autonomous zone.
Except that explanation is also untrue because the gunman photo was taken on June 10th.
The storefront image with a broken window was from May 30th.
So it was not taken from this week.
This week being last week.
But this still isn't the full story.
For a while on Fox News's Web site, there was an image of a building burning right above
a bunch of stories about protests in Seattle.
Remember that Friday was June 12th.
The stories about Seattle that do all of the stories below the image are about Seattle.
And yet the picture that they're showing was from St. Paul, Minnesota, two weeks prior
in May,
totally fake fabricated narratives per The Seattle Times.
On Saturday, Fox apologized in an editor's note posted, saying that the home page photos
did not clearly delineate the splicing together of multiple images from different locations
and that they regret that these errors took place.
So you can disagree about the Capitol Hill autonomous zone, the Char's.
It is mostly peaceful.
It's mostly artists painting murals and the like.
But there have been bad actors.
No question people showing up with guns causing more unrest.
But does Fox want to generate more unrest by showing doctored photos?
The answer is yes, they do.
That's exactly what they want to do.
Or they simply don't care about the truth of the situation, which is also possible and
also not good.
But understand that they ran this stuff on their Web site for hours and hours.
They got caught.
And the next
day, whoops.
Sorry.
And that said, and everybody forgets about it and moves on.
Zoom out and look at the last three months.
We've had distorted lies about testing fed to us for weeks by the president and repeated
by Fox News until they just stop talking about testing altogether because that wasn't convenient.
We had these distorted unemployment numbers.
Oh, with unemployment down to thirteen point three footnotes, really, sixteen point three
used by Trump and Fox News in a sort of self-congratulatory tour, fake descriptions of protests as heavily
riddled with an TIFA.
Not true.
As heavily violent.
Not true.
And here they're adding to that with fake doctored pictures from protests from a range
that is actually multiple weeks in multiple places presented as here's one discrete thing
that took place in Seattle.
It's propaganda.
This is how propaganda works.
And the Trump administration and Fox News
and O.J. and and other right wing Web sites that I don't even want to name are working
together to spread this stuff.
And we've got to make sure we don't allow it to.