Last year Fox News suffered some of the most embarrassing episodes of journalistic failure in recent history. They were so determined to orchestrate a Republican victory that they repeatedly shifted their analysis of presidential polling based on whether or not their candidate was ahead. If Romney was leading in any poll, Fox would hype it relentlessly and celebrate the wisdom of the pollsters. But if Obama took the lead, Fox feverishly denounced the polls as biased and unbelievable. They even went so far as to ignore their own polls if the result was favorable to Obama.

Late in the presidential campaign an obscure blogger published what he claimed were “unskewed” polls. He re-weighted the partisan breakdowns on the published polling to presume higher numbers of Republicans in the electorate. After Obama’s decisive victory, Fox News, and the rest of the GOP establishment, were shamed by their diversion from reality. Their audience was furious at having been so flagrantly misled. A humbled Fox then fired and/or benched their most blatant info-manglers like Dick Morris and Karl Rove, and promised to do better in the future.

Well, so much for that promise. This morning’s headline on Fox News blared an utterly false rendering of poll results in the Massachusetts special election to fill John Kerry’s senate seat. The article, with no byline or source (but numerous grammatical errors), stated flatly that “Polls Show Gomez, Markey close in special election race for Mass senate seat.” However, that can only be true if you consider a 9.3 average advantage for Markey as being “close.” The lede paragraph declares…

“The Senate race is (sic) Massachusetts is deadlocked heading into the final weeks […] Yet most polls show first-time Republican candidate and former Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez within just several percentage points of Democratic Rep. Edward Markey”

Actually, most polls show Markey with a sweeping lead. The RealClearPolitics average of polls for the race give Markey a 9.3% lead, and some polls have his lead as high as 12%. How Fox takes that data and describes the race as “deadlocked” is beyond explanation. What’s more, in a story that is ostensibly reporting poll results, the polling data is not even mentioned until the twenty-first paragraph of a twenty-four paragraph article. The whole thing reads like a press release from the Gomez campaign if it were written by a functionally illiterate press agent.

What Fox hopes to achieve with this brazenly dishonest reporting is hard to figure. If they think that by manufacturing a fake competitiveness in the race it will improve Gomez’s prospects for victory, they have learned nothing from their embarrassing behavior last year. More likely, they are merely fulfilling their role as the GOP PR agency whose duty is to hype Republican positions and politicians without regard for the truth. And if this is a prelude to how Fox will conduct itself in next year’s mid-term elections, we can expect another season of sensationally skewed reporting that woefully misinforms their gullible audience. Actually, it should be kinda fun.

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