Fox News contributor Karl Rove took to The O'Reilly Factor to hype a new web ad, “Replay,” put out by the conservative super PAC he co-founded. The American Crossroads ad paints President Obama's statement that his small business remarks have been taken out of context as dishonest, presenting Fox's deceptively truncated version of the president's remarks as the full version of his comments.
During the segment, Rove said the goal of the ad was “to mock the president for saying you took my words out of context.” He then repeated the false Fox narrative of Obama's comments, claiming that the president “stood up there, in front of a crowd in Roanoke, and diminished the success of small business people by saying, 'if you build a business - you know, somebody else did that.' ”
Of course, Obama said no such thing. In Bloomberg's review of the Crossroads ad, the report noted: “The problem, of course, is that Obama's words have been spliced and diced in this ongoing game." Here's the full context of Obama's comments, with the tiny snippet that is repeated in the Crossroads ad bolded below:
OBAMA: [L]ook, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
Later on, Sean Hannity also played the Crossroads ad, and incredibly claimed that “there's no slicing, no dicing, full context” in it.
This is merely the latest example of Fox promoting its amazingly deceptive version of Obama's remarks. The deceptive editing made its way through the network, eventually appearing in the Romney campaign's talking points and attack ads. Fox then hyped Romney's use of the false attack they helped to create.