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On The Rachel Maddow Show tonight host Rachel Maddow took on Fox News and their selective editing of the California ACORN tapes. Maddow played both the Fox News edit of the tapes, and the full tapes. Maddow said, “If you watched the footage these guys released, if you followed the wall to wall coverage on Fox…If you are a member of Congress who voted to defund ACORN…You were had.”

Here is the video courtesy of Media Matters:

After playing the edited tape and the full tape side Maddow said, “If you watched the footage these guys released, if you followed the wall to wall coverage on Fox, if you read all of the fawning mainstream media coverage of what these guys did, if you were a member of Congress and you voted to defund ACORN because of the outrage portrayed in these tapes, you were had.”

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Maddow debunked the claim that an ACORN employee was willing to help set up a prostitution ring of underage girls floated by Fox News. she pointed out that the ACORN employee actually called the police and reported O’Keefe and Giles. She said, “The fact that the ACORN employee collected all that information including phone numbers and dates the supposed crime was planned for and passed that information on to the police that never made it into that Fox News report of this outrage at the San Diego ACORN office.”

Ms. Maddow destroyed the Fox News story that ACORN employees were encouraging O’Keefe and Giles and their underage prostitute smuggling. She played the unedited tape and said, “What actually happened is that O’Keefe and Giles told this ACORN employee that they couldn’t find housing because Ms. Giles was a prostitute, and that’s when that employee turned to her and encouraged her to keep trying to get housing for herself, not encouraging her to start a prostitution business, but encouraging her to keep trying in her effort to get housing.”

She then took aim at Fox News, “This is not meant to excuse what ACORN has done wrong in the past, but the huge tide of negative publicity that followed these video tapes and the coverage they got on Fox wall to wall for months was bull pucky. It was a dishonest political stunt that bears no resemblance to journalism and no resemblance to the actual facts of what happened in those offices, but it worked.”

This story is an example of why Maddow’s program is the best of all of the prime time cable talk shows. She takes the time to point out the facts. Her show is unique because she is not on the air carnival barking a political agenda like Olbermann, O’Reilly, and Hannity. She isn’t running an old school fluff hour like Larry King, and Anderson Cooper’s program is more focused on news not analysis. She stands out because she is educating the viewers who tune in to her show.

The really sad part of this is the people who really need to see this segment will never see it. The loyal Fox News viewers who willingly embrace the propaganda based fantasy program that the network churns out every single day would reject this reality even if it was presented to them by a program they could accept. Fox News is not a news organization. They are a political propaganda dissemination tool, and no one should unquestioningly accept any statement that is uttered on their airwaves as fact, because every word that is uttered there is done so to advance their right wing agenda.

