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Greenwald: Fox adds sexually explicit video into serious news stories

By Mike Aivaz and Adam Doster, The Raw Story

While many commentators on Fox News are ideologically opposed to cultural smut, Fox News finds a way to fit that same smut into many of their broadcasts. So says Robert Greenwald, whose new mini-documentary details Fox's misuse of sexually explicit video in their news programming.

"It seems consistent," he said on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. "It certainly seems to be the pattern with [Fox President Roger] Ailes, who has taken every possible element of news and degraded it, degenerated it, and turned it into, in this case, smut. And if it is not smut, we see the right wing propaganda."

While the intuitive justification for showing sexually explicit images is to boost news ratings, Greenwald says that these videos and pictures don't bring in extra cash.

"But they're in a little bit of trouble here because the advertisers absolutely hate this." he says. "I mean, they may disagree politically, but the advertisers really don't want to be paying for smut."

The documentary also suggests that the diversions of "T&A" distract from coverage of issues of greater importance, like the war in Iraq.

"The studies have been done showing how little they cover some of the serious and important news stories because so much time—they‘re showing Girls Gone Wild in prime-time," he says. "I guarantee you the advertisers don't know that. But, of course, with Fox, it's a real question; you know, are we better off? Because we don‘t want them covering the news the way they cover it."

The following video is from MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, broadcast on November 12, 2007