FOX News: "We're not making this up!"

Fox & Friends apparently spent Tuesday morning covering a parody news story as a real news story. Says that guy who sits on the left side of the couch, "We're not making this up!... We're not being duped. I looked this up on a couple of Web sites up there."

And later in the day, Lou Dobbs picked up that erroneous "ham sandwich" fact from the Fox program, too (it was introduced in the Associated Content parody. The original incident involved a ham steak). Dobbs may not get his marching orders directly from Roger Ailes, but he's got his populist outrage down pat: "Mr. Superintendent, may I say, you're out of your cotton-pickin' mind."

Somebody. Shoot. Me..

Comments

[Janet]

hey, this is GREAT! It's a fine example of the diligence and fact-checking used by the crack news team at Fox .. .and by "crack" I mean the kind they sell in my neighborhood.

[Tim]

Journalism Scandals

[Tim]

Newspaper Reporter and Editor Attitudes Toward Credibility, Errors and Ethics

We asked all respondents, regardless of current role, to tell us whether they had “above-average experience” in 20 specific areas of news coverage. Our motivation for asking these questions came from a desire to learn how many journalists regularly report on errors and fabrications in the news (the central theme of the Mongerson Prize) and to put the extent of such reporting in context with other coverage. But as the chart on the right shows, very few respondents say they have experience investigating and reporting either of those issues.

Less than one-third (30 percent) cite active “internal investigation” as a significant factor in uncovering ethical misconduct.

External investigation, whether by other media or law enforcement, occurs rarely.

Whether the low percentage of discovery by active investigation reflects complacency on the part of newsroom managers, limited resources allocated to self-policing or great skill in obfuscation by those perpetrating offenses is not entirely clear from the data.

The share of respondents who feel newspaper reporters have a responsibility to correct mistakes in other media is quite strong at 58 percent. Of the remainder, half (22 percent) have no clear opinion. Only 20 percent disagree.

[Tim]

Ahhh, research, research, research.

[Daniel]

The part where she comes back and tries to tap-dance past the screw-up? Man, that's priceless. And wouldn't you love to know how she got her hands on that quote?

But here's the serious question with all three of these dumb-ass 24-hour cable news examples: What's their process? I know it's a seat-of-your-pants industry with a low signal-to-noise ratio, but even the most rudimentary review by a competent news intern would have spotted both of these parodies as PARODIES. These were slow-pitch journalistic softballs, and here are three networks that whiffed on them like they were major league curves.

I would think that TV news networks would want to invest SOME money in avoiding this kind of humiliation.

[Tim]

Expediency bias thrives at all three 24/7 networks. But then, as the Medill report shows, there is very little effort invested in protecting or guarding against the expediency bias in the newsroom culture, generally.