Most moderates and independents and all liberals take a very dim view of the Fox News Channel, for obvious reasons. But praise must go to Fox News Channel’s Greg Gutfeld for his recent pushback on right-wing smears against Hillary Clinton.
Here is the context: A conservative organization called America Rising put out a video that purported to show Hillary Clinton looking like an arrogant, obnoxious monster telling a woman to go to the back of the line. Once you watched the whole video, it became apparent to everyone that Clinton was simply providing helpful directions to someone looking for where to stand in order to get things signed.
Mediaite.com sums up what happened next.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld called out America Rising for the video. Via Media Matters:
“She said [to] the woman to go to the end of the line, because that’s where you get your stuff signed. She wasn’t being rude. This thing that’s from America Rising was out of context, and when companies do stuff like that, we no longer trust you. Because I don’t know what to believe, but if you look at the whole video, she was saying, oh I’m shaking these hands, if you meet me over on the other side, you could sign it. She wasn’t being rude at all. Believe me, there are too many problems with Hillary. We don’t need to do this.”
Most people in business and civic life don’t have to worry about being quoted out of context in a way that twists their words into making them look like monsters. Politics is different. We live in a world where politicians are quoted out of context to instantly demonize them.
So if you were a political candidate and you said on TV “I love nothing more than to start my day hugging my babies and spouse” you could easily be edited down to “I love nothing” to paint you as an amoral sub-human.
This is why you have to vet your sources when it comes to where you get political information. And it means that when you hear something awful about a politician, you often need to take it with a grain of salt.
TJ Walker is president of Media Training Worldwide. You can find his online training courses here. https://www.mediatrainingworldwide.com/online-training.html