If you’ve been away from the blogosphere since Friday, you may not have heard that the estimable Josh Marshall uncovered the fact that Fox News has taken to literally making things up about John Kerry.
The chief political correspondent for “Fox News” wrote a fictitious story Friday referring to Sen. John F. Kerry as a “metrosexual” who does manicures that was temporarily posted on the network’s website.
In a piece titled “The Metrosexual and the Cowboy,” correspondent Carl Cameron quoted Kerry as telling supporters at a rally in Tampa, Fla., “Didn’t my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!”
At another point, Cameron quoted Kerry as saying, “I’m metrosexual — he’s a cowboy.”
So Carl Cameron, who is still covering the Kerry campaign for the “fair and balanced” network, made up some ridiculous Kerry quotes, which the network published online as if it were real. Cameron has since been “reprimanded,” according to the network, though that doesn’t appear to include any actual punishment.
“Carl Cameron made a stupid mistake and he has been reprimanded for his lapse in judgment,” [Fox spokesman Paul] Schur said. “It was a poor attempt at humor and he regrets it.”
The very next day, Fox News ran an item about “Communists for Kerry,” as if it were a real organization, not noticing that the group is a “parody” project of a Republican group in New York.
When a network has no credibility, it’s hard to become even less reliable, but Fox News seems to be doing its best to reach unseen levels of uselessness.
But let’s take a moment to compare it to the new standard for controversial news screw-ups: CBS.
As everyone now knows, CBS got caught relying on fabricated documents about Bush’s alleged National Guard service. For its mistake, CBS has been widely condemned, calls for Dan Rather’s resignation have been common, and far-right lawmakers in Congress are threatening hearings to determine if the network engaged in criminal conduct.
But the contrast with Fox News couldn’t be clearer. With CBS, someone else made up damaging claims about Bush; with FNC, the network did the fabricating itself. With CBS, an internal investigation, led by outsiders, was launched to review the network’s mistakes. With FNC, the “reporter” who mocked the Dem candidate with child-like disdain is not only still with the network, he’s still covering the same Dem candidate. CBS is a news network; Fox News is a propaganda machine. This was obvious before, but now FNC isn’t even trying to pretend anymore.
It’s also interesting to note the reaction from the rest of the mainstream media. CBS’s mistake generated breathless excitement about fraud and scandal. Fox News’ mistake was greeted with, “There they go again.” FNC, in other words, suffers from the soft bigotry of low expectations. Everyone expects low-quality reporting and unchecked bias — and the network is rising to the occasion.
Matt Yglesias raised a good point over the weekend:
Fox is not “biased” or even “opinionated” — it certainly isn’t ideological. It’s an arm of the Republican Party, a group of vicious hatchet-men leavened by occasional doses of Alan Colmes, David Corn, and Jim Pinkerton. Organizations of this sort invent anti-Kerry propaganda out of whole cloth all the time. They have nothing to be embarrassed about except that they got caught.
Exactly. And after getting caught, the network sees no reason to change or take action because it’s merely reinforced what we’ve known to be true all along.