If you spent any time looking at Twitter on Tuesday night, your eyeballs are probably bleeding a little bit from the onslaught of hype and sensationalism surrounding a five-year-old video of Barack Obama talking about not much. With more than a little bit of help from Mike Drudge, Fox News Host and Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson drummed up an absurd amount of buzz around his "exclusive" look at the president's 2007 speech at Hampton University. Drudge said this was supposed to be "Obama's Other Race Speech." Carlson described it as a "racially charged speech [that] undermines Obama's carefully-crafted image." But when Fox News went live with the video around 9 p.m., everybody seemed, well, confused.
The video itself, as more than a few blogs pointed out, was not new, and it did not present Obama as an angry black man. The new, exclusive footage shows nothing more than candidate Obama being critical of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, just like everybody else did in 2007, and while the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright makes a cameo in the speech, everybody got over his connection to Obama years ago. What we did get was a couple of Fox News hosts struggling to make their so-called exclusive story relevant.
Exhibit One - Tucker Carlson admits that his exclusive story wasn't that exclusive. Why not? Because he "already reported on it" five years ago, just like everybody else:
Exhibit Two - Sean Hannity does a "black voice" on national television:
Exhibit 3 - Even Newsweek thinks they sensationalized this thing too much. Newsweek!
Footnote - The Romney campaign, by the way, distanced themselves from this stunt at the start.
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