Fox and Friends: Following in Hardball’s Footsteps?

The Atlantic Wire’s John Hudson writes that Fox and Friends wasn’t the first cable news show this year to produce a slick collection of bits aimed against a presidential candidate…

The crux of media complaints was that airing GOP ads is one thing but for a news network to produce and broadcast its own partisan pieces dangerously shifts its role from “journalism to advocacy,” as Mediaite’s Noah Rothman put it. By the same standard, however, one would have to argue that MSNBC is guilty of the same crime.

In late February, the left-leaning network aired a slickly-produced hit piece on Mitt Romney titled “Mitt: Better Off Mute” that aired on the nightly cable show Hardball with Chris Matthews and Sunday morning talk show The Chris Matthews Show, which typically airs on NBC affiliates and their sister stations. The video lampoons Romney’s habit of gaffing whenever he opens his mouth, and plays off the theme of the Oscar-winning film The Artist in which a silent film star struggles to adapt to films with sound.

The video latches onto the idea that, by appearance, Romney looks presidential and competent but is actually a buffoonish dunce. “Much like the perfect silent picture star whose career was thwarted by the emergence of sound in cinema, Mitt Romney has stumbled when he’s had to open his mouth,” reads the film’s YouTube description. Some might argue that the video is shorter in length (it’s a little over one-minute) and far less savage with its subject, but then we’re getting into gradations, which is a factor in all political advertising. For instance, the way the segment humorously displays the build-up of political hype surrounding Romney only to show him fail, resembles the satirical “Obama is cool” ads produced by GOP operative Karl Rove.