FOX 5/24/2006 Propaganda Fabrications Involving Jesse MacBeth Video

May 24 , 2006 - FOX lies about the popularity of a video on the web to discredit alleged US war crimes, internet news sources and "the anti-war movement "

Perhaps the most interesting propaganda campaign we have seen in connection to the Haditha Massacre was a massive and coordinated effort on the part of FOX news and the right wing bloggers to discredit any allegations of war crimes along with the entire "left wing" Internet. This campaign came in the form of fraudulent video testimony from Jesse MacBeth. In this video "testimony" Jesse MacBeth claims to have been a soldier in Iraq and to have committed a variety of horrendous war crimes. The video barely made a stir on the web since people questioned its validity within hours. Yet, on May 24, 2006, mere days after the video's first appearance on the web, FOX news spun fabrications about the video calling it an "anti-war video" and claiming "that thing posted on the internet [was] the #2 most clicked on blog on the Internet in the last few weeks." #2 most clicked on blog? One should question where FOX news would be able to obtain data on the most popular blogs – unless Dick Cheney's news favorite is even closer with the NSA than some might suspect. The data comparing traffic to various websites certainly is not available to FOX to make such a claim. But the claim was blatantly false anyway. Jesse MacBeth never had a blog. The video was posted on a small, low bandwidth website that could never have handled anywhere near that kind of traffic required for the #2 blog. In fact, three days before FOX's show, the website publicly registered just over 1500 hits - total, and the video wasn't available because the site couldn't meet even that meager demand; At 5 pm pst, two days before FOX's wild promotion of the MacBeth video, a Google search on Jessie MacBeth revealed only two obscure references to the video at all. The video was in fact downright difficult to find anywhere on the web that day, let alone the “last few weeks” before FOX's broadcast. FOX's deceptive promotion of this video and concurrent discrediting was deliberate propaganda to discredit not only any future or existing claims of war crimes, such as the Haditha Massacre, but to attempt to discredit internet “blogs” and the “anti-war” movement in general. By far the greatest promoters of the MacBeth video were FOX news and the right wing bloggers.