FOX News' Hannity Sort of Apologizes for Falsified Rally Report

Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet at 6:38 AM on November 12, 2009.

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Caught (dare we say it?) red-handed -- by those pinkos at The Daily Show -- falsifying a Hannity show report about last week's Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill, FOX News host Sean Hannity issued a grudging apology last night.

On the November 5 edition of his show, Hannity interviewed Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who had convened a Capitol Hill rally of Tea Party activists to rail against health care and hate on the president that very day. I was there, and would estimate crowd to have been about 5,000. Not bad for a Thursday afternoon.

Not enough for Bachmann and Hannity, apparently. Bachmann claimed that between 20,000 - 45,000 for her three-hours-hate at the Capitol while Hannity showed as evidence footage from the 912 march -- a much larger event that drew about 70,000 -- passing it off as B-roll from the Thursday rally.

Someone on Jon Stewart's staff was watching Hannity that night. Busted! (And in a most delightful way -- see video below the jump).

Last night, Hannity issued a grudging apology. Here's the transcript, via The Brad Blog:

HANNITY: Finally tonight...Although it pains me to say this, Jon Stewart, Comedy Central - he was right.

Now, on his program last night he mentioned that we had played some incorrect video on this program last week while talking about the Republican Health Care rally on Capitol Hill.

He was correct, we screwed up - we aired some video of a rally in September, along with a video from the actual event. It was an inadvertent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. So Mr. Stewart, you were right… we apologize… and by the way, I want to thank you, and all your writers, for watching.

Hannity's "apology"


Jon Stewart's take-down

Tagged as: fox news, jon stewart, sean hannity, michele bachmann, the daily show, rally, tea party, 912 march

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington editor.