Much of what is seen on Fox News is either false or twisted beyond all recognition to anything resembling reality. That is well known and extensively documented. But recently I have noticed some journalistic peculiarities that are curious editorially and affirm Fox’s reputation for incredulous and unethical reporting.
The first example of this odd behavior that I observed occurred last week when perusing the Fox News home page where I saw an article headlined “White House ‘Birther’ Strategy Backfires.” Since I couldn’t recall any current strategy concerning the Birther controversy emanating from the White House, I clicked the link to find out what it was about. What I found was an article that seemed dated and irrelevant. After poking around I eventually discovered that the article was actually dated April 27, 2011. At the time I just wrote it off as a clumsy attempt by Fox to inject some additional negative news about President Obama, as if all the other negative stories adjacent to it were not enough.
Today, however, I came across another incident of the same type. This article on Fox’s home page, where they post breaking news, was headlined “Hollywood Finally Admits It Discriminates Against Conservatives.” Once again, I had not seen any other news that addressed this topic so I clicked through to the article and discovered that it was originally written and posted on July 13, 2011. This item was an opinion piece by Breitbart protege Ben Shapiro and prominently promoted a book that had been published at about the same time that the article was first posted.
It is no longer surprising to find Fox misrepresenting the facts about news items they publish or broadcast. That is, after all, their mission. But this tactic of reprising stale articles that have no current news value is entirely unique in journalism. To be sure, some news entities will republish an older item when it has some relevance to current events. But they always identify it as a flashback or otherwise reveal its origins. What Fox is doing is posting old stories without any indication that they are old. A reader not paying close attention would never know that what they were reading was not breaking news like the other stories on the Fox home page. And while I have only stumbled across a couple examples of this, there are likely more that have gone unnoticed.
So why would Fox News do this? The easy answer is that they are just piling on the disparaging content they prefer in order to smear the President. But they have plenty of new articles they can (and do) distort for that purpose. The only other explanation is that they want to make certain that the old phony controversies they disseminated in the past are not forgotten by their disinformed audience of dimwits. Maybe Fox is just so proud of their prior lies that they hate to see them fade into obscurity. Or maybe they just like to see how far they can drift from ethical reporting before anyone notices.
