Mainstream Media Puts Fabricated Hoffa Quote Through The Fox Cycle Express
Written by Jeremy Holden
Published
This is the Fox Cycle on steroids.
Earlier this week, Fox News helped push a completely fabricated quote attributed to Teamsters president James Hoffa to accuse him of inciting violence against conservatives. Hoffa was actually encouraging workers to vote:
President Obama this is your army. We are ready to march. And President Obama we want one thing: jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. That what we're going to tell him. He's going to be - and when he sees what we're doing here he will be inspired. But he needs help and you know what? Everybody here's got to vote. If we go back and we keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong!
Drudge quickly cut that whole “everybody here's got to vote” thing and whittled Hoffa's statement down:
President Obama this is your army. We are ready to march. And President Obama we want one thing: jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. That what we're going to tell him. He's going to be - and when he sees what we're doing here he will be inspired. But he needs help and you know what? Everybody here's got to vote. If we go back and we keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong!
Cue Fox News, which promptly packaged Hoffa's statement in a video that perfectly matched the Drudge-approved framing.
Generally this type of editing requires an ellipses to denote, you know, the missing text. This is where the Fox cycle sped right past stage 3. Stage 3, recall, is where Fox News whines incessantly that the mainstream media is ignoring the fabricated story, browbeating the “liberal media” into stage 4 - echoing the right-wing distortions.
This time, mainstream media simply parroted the Fox News narrative. In the days since Fox manufactured a quote to portray Hoffa's comments as a violent call to arms, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have run with the deceptively edited quote, without making clear that the proper context of the quote had been excised.
It would be inexcusable for these news outlets to knowingly excise part of Hoffa's statement and treat it as an accurate quote. It's not much better for these organizations to blindly adopt Fox News' fabrication.
The Detroit Free Press released the full transcript of Hoffa's speech.