Fox & Friends threw a lot of stones at ABC News’ Brian Ross from its very glassy house this morning.
Fox’s Mollie Hemingway joined Fox’s Trump Friends to pile on Ross who has been suspended after erroneously reporting that Michael Flynn had been directed by candidate Donald Trump to contact the Russians.
Hemingway sneered that Ross had been “punished” by getting “the entire month of December off,” as if getting suspended without pay was some kind of perk. She called Ross’ report “a big mess up on a big story, tanking the market, not doing a good job with the clarification, having trouble actually admitting that it was a full retraction.”
Hemingway continued, “Brian Ross has a history of making pretty serious mistakes. There’s the Tea Party incident where he blamed a Tea Partier for the Aurora Colorado theater shooting. He also said that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the anthrax in Washington, D.C. after 9/11 even after he was told before he went to air with that that that wasn’t a true story. He also was involved in another bad story about Toyotas accelerating.”
Then she started in on the real Fox message: delegitimizing any news outlet that doesn’t shill for Trump. “It’s not just that these bad stories affect people’s lives or they cause the stock market to tank, they also really affect media credibility and that’s why he and his organization should be far more careful.”
Cohost Steve Doocy murmured his agreement.
Cohost Rachel Campos-Duffy noted that ABC did apologize. But, she “asked,” “Are they really holding themselves accountable or are they being held accountable by the tweets that the president’s been putting out with his very powerful social media platform?”
“Well, they’re certainly not being held accountable so much by many other figures,” Hemingway groused. She went on to complain that Politico had a story about “conservatives” blasting Ross. “It shouldn’t just be conservatives who are upset with fake news. Everybody should be upset,” she whined, as the Curvy Couch agreed with her.
Then, acting out her best concern troll, Hemingway added that “if anybody, Trump critics should be the most upset because that totally plays into his hands about the problems with media credibility.”
Sorry, but that "thoughtfulness" was a load of crap. For one thing, it's from a network (and Hemingway is a paid contributor) that retracted without apologizing for a conspiracy theory about Seth Rich’s murder that tried to pin the 2016 leak to Wikileaks on the dead DNC staffer. In fact, ever after Fox's retraction, Sean Hannity declared, “Not only am I not stopping, I am working harder.” I’ve yet to see an apology from Hannity, either, much less a suspension.
Fox did apologize for its Muslim “no go zones” errors. As did E.D. Hill (who subsequently lost her show) for “asking” if a dap between then-candidate Barack Obama and his wife was a “terrorist fist jab.”
So let’s see, Fox falsely suggested that DNC employee Seth Rich was murdered because he was the “real” colluder with Wikileaks (as opposed to anyone connected with Trump), promoted fake news about Muslim neighborhoods and suggested Barack and Michelle Obama are terrorists. But Mollie Hemingway doesn’t see a pattern there, oh no.
Nor did Hemingway show a care in the world that Trump had just retweeted fake-news smears about Muslims from a member of a far-right British party.
So before Hemingway and her Trump Friends lecture anyone else in the media about truth and bias, they ought to own up to the mess on their own side of the street first.
Watch the hypocrisy below, from the December 4, 2017 Fox & Friends.