Despite Time's report that photos had been in prof's safety deposit box Fox asks if media sat on photos until after election
Referring to Time magazine's photo essay, "Obama: The College Years," a 1980 photo shoot of President-elect Barack Obama by then-fellow student Lisa Jack, Sean Hannity stated on the December 18 broadcast of his radio show: "Just take a look at this. Barack Obama has a hat, you know, pulling a drag on a cigarette." He then asked: "I wonder if they had a picture of John McCain, you know -- I wonder why -- why didn't we see these pictures beforehand?" Hannity continued: "You think the media maybe thought, well, it might not hurt -- it might not help Barack Obama?" In fact, according to Time, Jack "put the negatives in a safety-deposit box, so that they could not be used until after the election." Jack is now an assistant professor of psychology at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, not a media photographer.
Similarly, on the December 19 edition of Fox & Friends First, teasing a segment on the Time photo essay, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked: "Was Time magazine sitting on these photos until after the election?" During the ensuing segment on Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson asked: "Would it have -- I don't know. Would it have served any purpose to release these photos before the election?" Co-host Steve Doocy responded: "Yeah, well, you know, so here you've got these pictures of the president and some of the headlines that said something about, look he was cool even back then. What if somebody else like [Sen. John] McCain had pictures like that. ... [Y]ou've got to figure that they probably would have come out before the election." Fox & Friends then aired a series of altered photos with McCain's face replacing Obama's in the pictures.
