A newly-released report from a South Carolina state investigation has found that, despite Fox News fear mongering reports to the contrary, there was no indication that anyone purposefully cast a ballot using the name of a dead person in South Carolina. Yet while Fox pundits used the Republican cries of "voter fraud" as "proof" that more stringent voting restrictions were needed and Fox News promoted the alarmist cries, there has been no similar reporting on what turned out to be nothing more than a piece of partisan political theatrics that was as phony as the ACORN "exposé" Fox also blindly promoted.
From Media Matters:
The South Carolina "dead voter" claim sprang from testimony from Kevin Schwedo, the director of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles, who said on January 11, 2012, that more than 950 residents were recorded as having cast a vote after their reported death date. Schwedo made clear that this could have been the result of data errors or voters dying after casting an absentee ballot, but the state's Republicans, led by Attorney General Alan Wilson, seized on the report as evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Wilson took his campaign to Fox News, where he received a platform for softball interviews from several anchors. The network used the "dead voter" story to promote South Carolina's voter ID law, which had been blocked by the Justice Department.
And yet, as of noon yesterday, according to Media Matters, there was no reporting on Fox about the collapse (of yet another) of its inflammatory memes nor the needless expense of public resources to investigate the phony claims. Even though, as Media Matters' Matt Gertz noted, "One would expect a network as obsessed with state spending as Fox to have something to say about that sort of waste."
The Columbia (SC) Free Times reported:
Bamberg County Democratic Rep. Bakari Sellers lashed out at the Republican officials who last year riled the public with the specter of dead voters haunting the ballot box. He said he hoped they were held accountable for compromising the public trust and integrity in the state's election process.
"They lied to our entire state and then they lied to our entire nation," Sellers said.
And Fox News helped.
So who's the real fraudster now?
I forget who originally said this…”A lie can make it halfway across the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. This is the philosophy of Fox News and it works very well and they’ll continue it as long as it works.
