No Smoke and Mirrors, Just Live TV
Earlier this week, critics jumped on Fox News for airing older footage of Sarah Palin at a 2008 campaign rally during a report about her current book tour. Charges were leveled that the older campaign rally footage was used to leave the impression that Palin's book tour crowds were larger than in reality. Fox News however claimed that the footage was aired by accident. For anyone familiar with live television, this could have happened quite easily by mistake.
In live television, this is how it works behind the scenes: The on air talent has a list of each of the available clips in front of him. The list is coded (numbered) and the control room producer has a similar page, numbered the same; ditto the director and technical director. The director tells the technical director to push a button that plays the short clip, but there are many different buttons to choose from, each one of which would play a different clip.
It happens all the time that someone hits the wrong button and plays the wrong tape. With Palin so much in the news, there would have been various Palin clips cued up at the time they made this mistake. Fox News gets sloppy just like all the news channels. And in fact, these mistakes happen more frequently when the B-team is working (during daytime, on weekends and over night - all lower-rated viewing periods).
Also, the video clip catches the on air anchor saying that the footage he wants to show is "just coming in," so there may have been added confusion in the control room. The technical director would have had to properly identify a clip that was just delivered to the room on a feed via satellite or microwave truck. This "last minute breaking news" aspect would only compound the opportunities for error.
No doubt, as the wrong clip was played, the control room producer started swearing, the director threw up his hands, the technical director looked miserable and crestfallen, and somebody probably said "get out back to the anchor on camera", and they did.
In this case, on live television it is quite easy for Fox News to have aired the wrong footage by mistake. But for a channel that is shilling for Palin pretty egregiously, they do not have my sympathy.