Had CNN spliced footage of a sparsely-attended Capitol Hill rally to discredit the reports of large numbers of attendees to the 9/12 rally in September, conservatives would have rightly howled about media bias. What will conservatives say about Fox News splicing footage of the 9/12 rally into coverage of Michele Bachmann’s otherwise well-attended rally last week? Jon Stewart gives Fox News a well-deserved poke in the eye for fudging the footage, as well as exposing rather clearly its source:

The irony of this is that Fox didn’t need to do anything of the sort. Whether one accepts the Washington Post’s estimates of crowd size (10,000 people) or those of the organizers (25,000-40,000), the weekday rally drew an impressive number of people. Many people had to miss a few days of work to attend it. Here in Minnesota, people paid their own travel costs to go by bus to DC and back, which ate up three days of travel. And the rally did its job in attracting media attention and focus on the ire of Americans opposed to another massive expansion of government.

Fox didn’t do us any favors in using rather easily-exposed editing tricks to make the already-impressive showing look better. It did a disservice to Rep. Bachmann in this instance. Let’s stick to the facts — they speak well enough as they are, and besides, that’s what a news organization should do. (via Jazz Shaw)