Baltimore Fox Affiliate Edits Video Of Protesters To Make Them Appear To Be Chanting, ‘Kill A Cop’

Where to begin. (Sigh.)

First, for lack of a better summary, yesterday's article by Brendan James at TPM. Go there; read it in order; note that at least one viral video is named "[Al] Sharpton's 'Go Kill A Cop' march in Wash DC", a rather provocative title.

So did the poster of the YouTube version that went viral make up the attribution of "Kill a Cop" to Sharpton? Um, no. The Fox station in Baltimore did that, and the Gawker article has the original video and the Fox-tampered version one right after the other.

The actual words chanted, as revealed by the unaltered tape:

We won't stop!
We can't stop!
'til killer cops are in cell blocks!

The Fox-modified version:

We won't stop!
We can't stop!
So kill a cop!

(NOTE: Gawker has inadvertently swapped "won't" and "can't" in both transcriptions. The actual chant and Fox's modification are both correctly rendered above.)

The bolded last line is the one never spoken by the protesters. But that won't matter to a RWNJ who shows up at the next protest by this group, which calls itself "Justice for All". People so stooopid they believe anything that comes via Fox won't hesitate to carry a gun and flip the sense of the alleged last line by shooting at a protester.

In short, this local Fox station's postprocessing crew suborned murder.

Ten to twenty years ago, I used to hit the streets, protesting all kinds of things with all kinds of groups... the death penalty with the local Amnesty International; Baby Bush's Iraq War with a variety of groups, etc. I even appeared on TV a couple of times. On the whole, I felt physically safe in those protests: in the good old days, all a protester needed to know is how to assert her- or himself in a nonaggressive manner, and of course what his/her rights are and how to claim them as diplomatically as possible. I was never even arrested, let alone assaulted.

Now, even if I were sufficiently recovered to resume participation in street protests, I would feel a real sense of personal risk, from the police, from agents provocateurs, from opposing protest groups (a regular feature of antiwar protests; you'd be amazed how many people don't believe Americans other than themselves have the right of free speech)... and now we can add to that list, Fox News.

Fox can go straight to Hell as far as I'm concerned.

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UPDATE: for what it's worth, Fox 45 Baltimore has apologized and offered some minimal air time to some protesters. That really doesn't mitigate the dangerous nature of their act in falsifying, on air, what the protesters said in the first place. Protesters' lives are in danger because of the Fox station. As far as I'm concerned, there's no going back from that act.