Behind the scenes video at 9/12 protest shows Fox News producer coaching crowd

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909180037


We just received the following behind the scenes footage from an anonymous tipster showing what appears to be a Fox News producer encouraging a crowd to scream and holler during a "report" by Fox News' Griff Jenkins at the 9/12 protest:

-snip video-

Here's how it looked on Fox News:

-snip video-

We would expect that type of behavior from a producer of, say, a daytime talk show with a live studio audience like Oprah or Maury or Jerry, but from a cable news producer? Really?

I guess it wasn't enough for Fox News to promote the hell out of Glenn Beck's 9/12 death march – they also needed to incite the crowd – you know, get them nice and pumped up so they'd looked good for the cameras.

Fair & Balanced? More like Fake & Staged.

Sigh.
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Why is anyone surprised at this? I do hope these videos appear on the other networks' news programs, though.

Civil Rights marches in the South television, news people would have all the marchers scrunch together and crop the shots to make it look like there was a bigger crowd marching than there was. News folk always want to make their news stories seem more newsworthy than they really are.

Of course, Fox carries this to an extreme by promoting and stage managing astroturf events and then wildly exaggerating numbers and significance, but the impulse is not without some parallels in other media outlets.

or did you pull that out of ass?

March and other Civil Rights events. Back in the early 1970s he did a photo exhibit in San Francisco on how the press covered the civil rights movement, which, I remember, included images of TV camermen on the back of a flatbed truck immeditely in front of the marchers. In his introduction to the exhibit, he explained how they directed the marchers to configure themselves in certain ways, to provide more dramatic images for the news. The photographer was name Bob Phipp or Phipps (not sure of spelling) and he is still around, living in Laguna Beach, CA, I think, and is still selling his photos from this period.