Yes, Fox News lies on a daily basis. Yes, Fox News is utterly unethical. Yes, Fox News flagrantly promotes Republican dogma. But today they demonstrated how utterly shameless they are and how little regard they have for journalism. Take a look at this headline they posted:
“Reuters Under Fire For Confusing Report Alleging Soros Connection to ‘Occupy Wall Street’
On the surface this seems like a respectable effort to hold Reuters accountable for sloppy reporting. In fact, Reuters did publish a story that implied a connection between the Occupy Movement and George Soros. The substance of the article did not support that implication and Reuters received some criticism for the article. Later the same day Reuters removed the story and replaced it with one that made it clear that there was no such connection. The lede of the new article stated that…
“George Soros isn’t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics including radio host Rush Limbaugh that the billionaire investor has helped fuel the anti-capitalist movement.”
Reuters is still deserving of some criticism for replacing the flawed story rather than correcting it and acknowledging the error. That’s generally how reputable news organizations handle mistakes. But what Fox did is simply mind boggling.
When the original Reuters story ran yesterday, the headline was “Who’s behind the Wall Street protests?” But Fox Nation ran the item with a differnt headline that they composed themselves: “Is Soros Behind ‘Occupy Wall Street?'”
I reported this mangling of the truth yesterday pointing out how Fox went out of their way to distort a weakly sourced article by Reuters. But it isn’t enough for Fox to merely twist a set of non-facts in order to “cast doubt on the authenticity of the movement.” Now that Reuters has been shamed into revising their article, Fox is stepping forward to chastise Reuters while letting themselves off the hook.
What we have here is Fox calling out Reuters for publishing an inaccurate article that they themselves republished after making the error even worse. So if Reuters is under fire for a “confusing report,” Fox should be a blazing inferno for their deliberate deceit. Yet the Fox Nationalists fail to acknowledge their own malfeasance as they wag their finger at Reuters. What a pathetic bunch of disreputable losers.
The Fox headline implies Soros is still connected to the OWS, at least it could be interpreted that way, if you do not read beyong the headline. That is exactly what Fox is doing here, so of course, they would never issue a correction, that would ruin the headline.