Thursday night, both Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity showed and commented on a new video done by the Media Research Center that showed a disturbing trend among some college students at George Mason University. In the video, MRCTV reporter Dan Joseph posed as a liberal hater of Fox News to try to get students to sign a petition urging the Obama administration to spy on Fox News employees and their families’ phone and email records. [Listen to the audio here or watch the video after the jump]
This, of course, was done in the wake of the revelation that the Justice Department seized the phone and email records of Fox News correspondent James Rosen, and the phone records of the Associated Press.
In the clip that was shown on The O’Reilly Factor, it quickly became evident that the students harbored a vehement dislike for Fox News. A number of students claimed that they “hate Fox News,” despite the fact that some admitted that they “avoid it” and “watch it through Jon Stewart,” a liberal host on Comedy Central.
Hannity’s coverage of the video included a number of people who signed the petition without requesting clarification of any kind into the nature of the petition and showed a young woman who, as she signed her name, could not stop laughing at Joseph’s jokes about Fox News, calling it “Fox Noise”, “Fix News”, and saying that he prefers “Sanity not Hannity.”
After the clip ended, O’Reilly pointed out that, out of the 16 students that were interviewed in the video, 11 of them actually signed the petition to single out Fox News to make sure they were “not spinning their vicious lies.”
Guest Monica Crowley said that the results did not surprise her because “the left controls academia, the culture, and the news media” but that it was troublesome that only a few of the students objected to a clearly unconstitutional practice while the others “seemed ready to throw the First Amendment out of the window.”
