But you knew that
“Again, bear in mind that Fox is not a news organization,” semi-retired journalist, Sam Litzinger, reminds Mastodon readers. Litzinger refers to this Saturday evening story at CNN Business:
Fox News apologized Saturday to a Gold Star family for publishing a false story last month claiming that the family had to pay $60,000 to ship the remains of their fallen relative back from Afghanistan because the Pentagon refused to pay.
“The now unpublished story has been addressed internally and we sincerely apologize to the Gee family,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, referencing the family of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, who was one of 13 service members killed in a terror attack at the Kabul airport in 2021 while assisting with US withdrawal efforts.
The apology came after a Military.com report this week drew attention to the issue and indicated that the right-wing outlet’s top executives had repeatedly been notified by senior members of the Marine Corps that it was pushing a false story.
Fox applied a bandaid to its false story by changing the headline to attribute the claim to Rep. Cory Mills (R) of Florida. But Mills retracted his statement. Fox then deleted the entire story “without a correction or explanation.”
Deleting an entire story is exceedingly rare in news media and is seen as a last-ditch measure if the entire premise of the article is incorrect. Deleting a story without offering readers an explanation or correction is widely considered to be unethical.
In this case, Fox News did not publicly address the incident until the Military.com story ignited backlash against the outlet.
While unethical, the behavior is typical for Fox News. The outlet often breaks traditional news ethics and traffics in dishonest reporting and commentary.
Yeah, we noticed. So did Fox personalities who peddle this stuff. So did Dominion Voting Systems.
CNN Business cites a “Reliable Source”s story days ago about the propaganda outlet:
The dishonorable conduct spelled out in black and white in the cache of legal filings would get most journalists fired at actual news organizations and constitute scandals that would permanently run them out of the news business — maybe even other industries as well.
And yet, just months later, Fox News is trying to move on, as if the shameful behavior brought to light by the Dominion case simply evaporated from history the moment it opened up its checkbook. In fact, while Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch did pay a record sum of money to make the Dominion case vanish, they kept in place the channel’s top executives, Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace. And, perhaps more importantly, they have expressed zero regrets for the dishonest Fox News programming that threw them in legal hot water.
But Fox News attempting to move past the embarrassing saga is not surprising. It is to be expected. What is striking, however, is how many credible news organizations are failing to describe in clear-eyed terms to their audiences — who count on them, and often pay them to deliver the unvarnished truth — what the network actually is.
Nevertheless, Fox News runs 24/7 on TV sets at restaurants, bars, and on military bases.