Yesterday on her Fox News show, Megyn Kelly thought it would be revealing in some fashion or another to run footage of protests from angry Latinos in Arizona, and run them side by side with footage from the Tea Party protests in Washington, D.C. in March.
Talk about selective footage: What they showed of the Arizona protests -- which indeed were largely peaceful -- were the moments when the rowdiness got out of hand and people were arrested. And of course, the footage they showed of the Tea Partiers was of moments when their protest was entirely peaceful -- not the ugliness that erupted when Democrats tried to walk through the crowd.
But it left me wondering: Why didn't Kelly and Co. do the same thing back in March when there were in fact immigration marchers in D.C. at the same time as the Tea Party protests on health-care reform?
As I noted then:
Indeed, this crowd was significantly larger than the much-promoted "9/12 March on Washington" last September, even though that event was endlessly promoted for over a month by Fox News (I know, I know; they like to claim they had 1.2 million people there, but the reality was that it was actually about 70,000).
Yet, strangely enough, there was only ONE Fox News crew on hand to cover the immigration march today. I spoke with the reporter for this crew, and he told me Fox News had several other crews on hand today -- but they were all up covering the Tea Partiers and the health-care vote.
And in case you're wondering, there were exactly ZERO stories on Fox News reporting on this march in advance. ZERO. I couldn't find any at CNN or MSNBC either.
There was exactly ONE report on Fox News covering this rally -- because Fox was so busy covering the Tea Party protesters.
On its website, Fox carried only an AP report (now scrubbed) and a slide show. That was it.
The final estimate for this crowd was 200,000 people -- which dwarfed the Tea Party protests. And it was considerably more peaceful and civilized than the ugliness up at the Capitol.
Wonder why they didn't do a comparison/contrast back then, don't you?
