Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz properly recognized Fox’s big blooper of the week: the reported death of Congressman Bill Young – while he was still alive. “That’s a terrible mistake,” Kurtz noted on his Media Buzz show yesterday. And then he did his best to make you think it was not so terrible by suggesting it was just like a couple of erroneous tweets about Fox’s correction.
“Fox apologized with its correction 12 minutes after the report aired,” Kurtz said. He added immediately, “But then the story took a strange twist online.”
The “strange twist” Kurtz was referring to were erroneous tweets from Politico’s Dylan Byers, the New York Times’ Brian Stelter and CNN’s Piers Morgan indicating that Fox had not apologized for its mistake.
“Well, we all make mistakes,” Kurtz concluded, before adding his condolences to Congressman Young’s family (Young had died the next day).
This was a clever sleight of hand from Kurtz. In the first place, while it's true that we all do make mistakes, some mistakes are much worse than others. There’s no real equivalence between a false, breaking news alert that a Congressman has died and a couple of erroneous tweets about Fox’s correction (or lack thereof). In the second place, the tweets were not really part of “the story” and had nothing to do with Fox’s gaffe. I doubt anyone other than Fox cared much about them. However, by lumping them all together as somehow of a piece, it allowed Kurtz to feign a tolerance for some Fox News antagonists at the same time that he was actually maligning them. And not so coincidentally distracting from Fox’s error.
Which, by the way, he never explained.
To put it how one of my FB friends summed up his show: It’s like he learned how to report the media from watching Taylor Swift explain her songs, and replacing “ex boyfriend” with “Mainstream Media.”
Even Newsbusters and Breitbart are hard-pressed to believe anything he says, I am not even kidding on that, even in text you can tell they hate him for making them second guess master Ailes. Which is probably why most watchdog sites are happy to just let him crash in peace.
Actually, we never make mistakes, we just plain & simple Lie a helluva lot! Remember:
In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States.
