During a Happening Now segment Wednesday, anchor Gregg Jarrett described "huge crowds" showing up to a Sarah Palin book tour event, and showed footage he described as "just coming in to us now" showing the former Alaska governor surrounded by adoring crowds.
But, as Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress reported, the images the network ran "appeared to be old file footage of Palin rallies from the 2008 presidential campaign."
Media watchdog MediaMatters soon confirmed the report, displaying a screenshot of Fox's footage from Wednesday's broadcast with a nearly identical image from a Palin rally in Ocala, Florida, shortly before last year's election.
While critics of Fox News will surely jump on this as further evidence that the network acts as a promotion tool for Republican politicians, network execs immediately declared that the incident was an innocent mix-up.
"This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video,'' senior vice-president Michael Clemente told the Chicago Tribune's Swamp Politics blog. "There will be an on-air explanation during Happening Now on Thursday."
Media observers pointed out that despite Jarrett's claim that the footage was "just coming in to us now," the mix-up may well have been unintended.
"This appears to be little more than a momentary disconnect between newsreader and news producer than a conscious attempt to mislead," writes Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post. "Of course, the fact that Fox was caught manipulating footage in a misleading manner is only going to spur further suspicions when things like this happen."
Last week, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity apologized to viewers after Comedy Central's Daily Show slammed the network for using footage of a Sept. 12 Tea Party rally in Washington evidently to make a Nov. 5 anti-health reform rally look bigger.
"Although it pains me to say this, Jon Stewart, Comedy Central -- he was right," Hannity said.
At that Sept. 12 rally, Fox News was caught stage-managing a crowd, with an off-camera producer waving instructions to chanting protesters.
Swamp Politics reports that this latest incident could result in firings at the network. "It's highly like[ly] that serious disciplinary action will be taken for those responsible behind the scenes in the control room," the blog reports. "News executives there consider this to have been a sloppy and unnecessary error."
The following video was broadcast on Fox News Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009, and upoaded to the Web by ThinkProgress.
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