During Wednesday night’s events at the DNC, I noticed some interesting differences between MSNBC and FNC crawls covering comments John Edwards made about changes to tax cuts. After Edwards’ speech ran and the crawls reappeared (well, FNC never took theirs away) on all channels, MSNBC repeated some of the more interesting quotes, including…”So now you ask how are we going to pay for this?…Let me be very clear, for 98 percent of Americans, you will keep your tax cut-that’s 98 percent. But we’ll roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, close corporate loopholes, and cut government contractors and wasteful spending.”
At the same time, FOX’s crawl carried the following…”So now you ask how are we going to pay for this?…We’ll roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, close corporate loopholes, and cut government contractors and wasteful spending.” I don’t speak for everyone, but unless FOX is attempting to appeal only to the “wealthiest Americans,” I’d say this is kind of changing the spirit of the statement.
Also heard on FOX after the speech - Black Eyed Peas came on stage to celebrate with “Let’s Get It Started,” and Brit Hume made a comment along the lines of “I don’t want to make any conspiracy statements here, but perhaps there’s the chance that the Democrats didn’t want people who wanted to criticize Edwards’ speech to be heard right after he left the stage, so they have the Black Eyed Peas up there. I’m sure they really appeal to people in the swing states.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have it taping on the TiVo but I think I got the general tone of what he had to say.
John Edwards’ speech can be found here at Newsday.
