The Pulitzer Prize winning fact checking site PolitiFact has revealed their 2014 Lie of the Year. It is an annual honor that they bestow “based on how broadly a myth or falsehood infiltrates conventional thinking.”
This year the award goes to a news item that was feverishly disseminated by conservative media and especially Fox News: Exaggerations about Ebola. Curiously, just after the midterm election the hysterical pronouncements of a rapidly spreading pandemic that was being deliberately orchestrated by President Obama seemed to fade into the ether from whence it came.
So as a service to the nation, News Corpse will reprise its feature article that studiously reminded readers of what the short-lived Armageddon-Lite had unleashed on the world, and the doom we all narrowly escaped thanks to Fox News curing the disease as soon as the election was over (which we’re sure was just a coincidence).
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Remember when…
…a travel ban on anyone from West Africa was the Republicans’ most important immigration issue in the nation?
Remember when…
…Bill O’Reilly insisted that the administration was lying to us and demanded that the CDC chief resign if he wouldn’t appear on his show?
Remember when…
…Fox’s “psycho” analyst Keith Ablow accused President Obama of wanting Ebola to spread in America because he “sees Americans as having infected others with our deadly economic policies?”
Remember when…
…Fox News was consumed by the threat of terrorists streaming across the southern border dripping with Ebola?
Remember when…
…the transmission of Ebola to a second American nurse constituted an “OUTBREAK?”
Remember when…
…Bill O’Reilly brought in Glenn Beck to accuse Obama of facilitating the spread of Ebola in Dallas because Dallas hates him (even though Dallas voted for Obama in larger majorities than he won nationally)?
Remember when…
…A Republican congressmen rushed to Fox News to feverishly accuse Obama of plotting to flood the U.S. with foreign Ebola patients?
Stay tuned for more lies and hysteria from Fox News as the 2016 election heats up in the coming weeks and months.
[Addendum] In PolitiFact’s readers’ poll for Lie of the Year (as opposed to their editorial selection) the winner (loser?) was the statement that “Global warming is a hoax.” While PolitiFact attributed this statement to a losing GOP congressional candidate, it has also been proffered by many other Republican pundits and politicians including Jim Inhofe, the incoming chairman of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee.
For Fox, the magical cure for Ebola apparently was the midterm elections.
But the tens of thousands of people who die every year from gun violence is not an epidemic but just the price of freedom?
Roger Ailes should pray he gets Ebola. Maybe he will lose some weight. Can’t do much about the ugly or the evil, though, unfortunately….