A video of Fox News contributor Steven Crowder getting punched by a Michigan union protester was selectively edited, and that editing was revealed during Crowder's appearance on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News.
The original video shows Crowder getting punched by a protester on Tuesday while Crowder was trying to stop an Americans for Prosperity tent from being torn down. The video, which is approaching a million views on YouTube, was picked up by the right as evidence of "union thuggery":
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But on Wednesday, Eclectablog's Chris Savage argued that Crowder's video is "actually a composite of things that happened over the course of the day, many of them hours apart."
Crowder defended himself on Twitter:
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He added that the full footage was shown on Sean Hannity's show the night before.
As Robert Mackey of the New York Times' Lede Blog points out:
Unfortunately for Mr. Crowder, a look at the video broadcast on the Sean Hannity show appears to show quite clearly that he left out an important section of the footage when he put together his edit. A section of the Fox News broadcast preserved by the Web site Mediaite shows that Mr. Hannity’s producers at Fox News started the clip five seconds earlier than Mr. Crowder did. What the extra footage reveals is the man who punched Mr. Crowder being knocked to the ground seconds before and then getting up and taking a swing at the comedian.
Mackey adds that there's another problem: "The still frame he used for the clip’s title image on YouTube, which offers a much clearer image of the man punching him, was obviously shot by a second camera, from an entirely different angle than the rest of the footage he presented of the man hitting him."
Here's the original video:
And here's the video from Hannity, via Mediaite:
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