Update: Fox News claims airing deceptive footage was just a ‘mistake’

Fox News’ Senior Vice President of News Michael Clemente told Mediate that the network simply made a “mistake” when it aired old footage of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) being booed.

“We made a mistake with some of the video we aired, and plan on issuing a correction on America’s Newsroom tomorrow morning explaining exactly what happened,” he said.

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Original report continues below…

Interviewing Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) on his victory in the CPAC 2011 presidential straw poll, the conservative Fox News Channel did something slimy: they cued up footage of the prior year.

While normally this could be passed off as a simple mistake — the same man presented poll results both years in front of the same backdrop and at the same podium — something of an editorial edict seems to have emerged.

The key difference between 2010 and 2011: In 2010, the room was full of former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney’s supporters, who booed the results. This year, the audience cheered and even began chanting Paul’s name (video archived below).

Paul said that in 2010, some of his supporters had trouble getting into the auditorium for the poll results, and one attendee wrote that it was because Paul’s Campaign for Liberty group had held a panel discussion that ran long, forcing his voters to watch from an overflow area.

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Appearing on Fox News yesterday (video archived below), host Bill Hemmer asked Paul why people had booed him when the 2011 results were announced, playing the wrong clip as a basis for his question.

Paul, the 76-year-old libertarian Republican, passed it off same as he did the year prior, when the hosts of Fox and Friends asked him virtually the same questions (video archived below).

Instead of taking it personally or correcting the network on their video’s proper context, Paul stayed on message.

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“I wasn’t there so I didn’t watch that little ceremony at the end,” he said. “But it shows you that people aren’t unanimous on this cause of liberty. I am very determined that liberty is the issue, but some people like being taken care of than demanding their freedoms.”

Paul added that his message was popular with conservatives because of the “younger crowd” that’s gravitated toward CPAC thanks to his presence.

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“They are very attracted to the foreign policy of less intervention overseas,” he said.

Paul won the 2011 CPAC presidential poll with 30 percent of the vote, followed by Romney at 23 percent.

This video is from Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, broadcast Feb. 15, 2011.

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This video is from CPAC 2011, snipped from CSPAN by MoxNews on Feb. 12, 2011. (Skip to 8:45 to see reaction.)

This video is from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, broadcast Feb. 23, 2010.

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David Edwards contributed to this post. Photo credit: Rich DeYoung.