On Thursday, Fox News again apologized to viewers for what it said was another honest mix-up. As 2008 footage of a well-attended Sarah Palin campaign rally played on the screen, Fox host Gregg Jarrett proclaimed that the former Alaska governor was "continuing to draw huge crowds while promoting her brand-new book." As the year-old images continued to roll, Jarrett added, "Some of the pictures [are] just coming to us. ... The lines earlier had formed this morning."
Courtesy of the Web site Think Progress, here's how the segment played out:
Michael Clemente, Fox's senior vice president of news, said the goof was unintentional.
"This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video," he said in a statement.
The network also issued an on-air apology.
It was the second time in two weeks that Fox aired footage that portrayed a crowd size as larger than it actually may have been. Last week, on host Sean Hannity's program, the network aired footage of a robustly attended protest on the Mall in Washington. It said the crowd had been at an anti-health care reform rally organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.
But Comedy Central's Jon Stewart noticed that the footage must have been taken quite some time before Bachmann's rally.
