Josh Marshall has the goods on Fox in this YouTube segment of TPM News. Essentially, he points out two incidents of what seem to be racist jabs–at the very least, errors based on a racist mindset, at the worst, intentionally racist pieces with political intent mixed in. The first is a piece from some weeks ago when Fox News ran a piece on alleged voter fraud. The voter fraud issue is pretty well established as fraud in itself, baseless accusations aimed at creating ‘remedial’ measures which would disenfranchise minorities, who vote predominantly Democratic. Fox News’ piece had stock footage of voters at a polling place, all of whom just “happened” to be black. Considering how many randomly chosen polling places in the U.S. would have only black voters present, and considering the unspoken race angle inherent in the right-wing cause, it stretches credulity to ask that this be a coincidence.

Then Marshall moves on to the most recent Fox News clip, one in which Fox is making a huge deal out of the Bill Jefferson case, talking it up as if it were the biggest scandal in recent memory (one could go on about how their use of “counts” against Jefferson relative to Cunningham is not a valid standard for measuring the breadth and width of a scandal, but that would be a bit off-topic here). But that’s just Fox News, you can expect that. What was notable about this piece is that when the “news” network switched to video footage of Bill Jefferson… it wasn’t Bill Jefferson. It was John Conyers, another black representative.

At first, you might forgive Fox because the shots are in a crowd from a bit of a distance, and at that level of detail, if you weren’t paying close attention, you might get the two mixed up. But then you realize several points which make you realize that excuse is too lame to accept. First of all, a news network should be correctly labeling and indexing all of its stock footage; Fox, apparently, does this only to the extent of noting “this is a shot of some black Democrat in Congress.” Second, the footage does not stay zoomed out; after a few seconds, it closes in and you can see very clearly that it’s not Jefferson and is indeed Conyers. Third, the footage includes someone holding a sign saying “RESIGN” which seems at first to be chiding “Jefferson” to resign–until you see “Jefferson” talking to someone who turns around and clearly is Roberto Gonzales. The “Resign” sign was aimed at him, not Jefferson/Conyers.

When you think about it, there are only two explanations: one, Fox News can’t tell black people apart and have a lousy indexing system and can’t tell one video event from another despite obvious clues… or two, they intentionally put the Conyers footage in as a racist political dig at Conyers–another riff on the “black Democrats are criminals” theme. Either way, there are clear racial undertones and practices which are unacceptable for even the most shoddy of news organizations. Not that this is the first time Fox has mislabeled or put in the wrong footage or labels somewhere–they branded Mark Foley a “Democrat,” for example, and have had a string of “errors” which always happen to dig at Democrats in one fashion or another.

And right-wingers wonder why Democratic candidates don’t want this network hosting their debates….

Anyway, watch the Marshall piece.