Sean Hannity's failure to be "fair and balanced"

How many factual mistakes are professional reporters/anchors allowed to make before they’re reprimanded or fired?

This is part 1 of a series that highlights false claims made by reporters or anchors.

A while back Sean Hannity played carefully-edited footage of Barack Obama on taxes. You really have to see and hear it for yourself. Click here.

Hannity prefaced the video by saying,

the president had a rare moment of honesty in his speech. I hope voters around the country are watching this

Hannity then aired footage of Obama saying:

taxes are scheduled to go up substantially next year [pause] for everybody

The clip then ended and Hannity added,

Alright and I’m sure that the anointed one will make sure that it happens

However, that was only the second half of Obama’s sentence. Here is the full sentence:

Under the tax plan passed by the last administration, taxes are scheduled to go up substantially next year ... [pause] for everybody. By the way, this was by design.

So Obama was saying that taxes are scheduled to go up because of Bush’s tax plan, not his own. The clip that Sean Hannity played omitted the first half of Obama’s sentence. It was removed to make it look like Obama is the one planning on raising taxes “for everybody”.

That is outrageous. Sean Hannity was either

a) intentionally / knowingly tricking people

or

b) was himself being tricked by someone higher up in the Fox News food chain.

In either case, this is one obvious example of Fox News failing to be “fair and balanced”. Obama has consistently said that the only group he was ever planning to raise taxes on is the group of people making more than 250,000 dollars a year.