It turns out that Fox News hero Cliven Bundy is not just a lawbreaking moocher – he’s also a big, fat liar. Those “ancestral rights” he boasts about – you know, the ones he claims go back to the 1800s – and therefore predate the federal government’s claim to the land Bundy refuses to pay to grace on? Turns out 1954 is the date the Bundy family really began grazing.

KLAS-TV in Las Vegas did the kind of investigating that Fox News – despite all its coverage – “objective” and otherwise – either failed to do or refused to do:

“I’ve lived my lifetime here. My forefathers have been up and down the Virgin Valley here ever since 1877. All these rights that I claim, have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage and the water and the access and range improvements,” Bundy said.

Clark County property records show Cliven Bundy’s parents moved from Bundyville, Arizona and bought the 160 acre ranch in 1948 from Raoul and Ruth Leavitt.

Water rights were transferred too, but only to the ranch, not the federally managed land surrounding it. Court records show Bundy family cattle didn’t start grazing on that land until 1954.

Meanwhile, over at Fox News, where they seem ready to demand Bundy’s face be carved into Mt. Rushmore, not one of the reporters or hosts seems to have even looked for this easily-verifiable information.

For example:

Last week, Sean Hannity said to Bundy, “How long have your cattle been out there grazing over the years? It goes back to the 1800s right?

“Objective” news host Harris Faulkner announced, “Two bits of fact here: The Bundy family… says they’ve been letting their cattle graze on that land since the 1800s…”

In other words, Fox repeatedly announced that the Bundy family’s grazing history is important but nobody was interested in any facts beyond what the Bundy family claimed. In addition to Hannity’s man crush on Bundy, we’ve also found positive segments or reports about the family on The Kelly File, On The Record, Fox & Friends, by Todd Starnes, supposedly objective reporters Griff Jenkins and William La Jeunesse (each of whom were on-scene at the Bundy ranch) and my personal favorite - Fox Nation likening Bundy to Gandhi and Thoreau.

As Jed Lewison at DailyKos pointed out, it really doesn’t matter that Bundy is a fraud. “Even if his family had lived on his ranch since 1877, it wouldn’t change the fact that his cattle are grazing on Federal, not private, land and that he should play by the same rules as everybody else,” he noted.

But the fact that Bundy lied about the basis for what he claims are his rights – and nobody at Fox did any fact checking – makes both him and the “fair and balanced” network all the more deplorable.