At Baptist Press, Starnes proved to be both unashamedly conservative and journalistically unreliable. He published articles decrying “the homosexual agenda” in America, warning of “pro-homosexual attitudes” at Baptist colleges, and even bemoaned the “profanity, anti-God lyrics” of the band Nine Inch Nails. But Starnes landed in hot water in April 2003 when he published a profile of then U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige.

According to Starnes, Paige said he “would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith.” The profile spawned national headlines and created outrage both among civil-rights groups and church-state watchdogs. And when at least a dozen members of Congress publicly called on Paige to either apologize for the remarks or resign, the secretary almost lost his job.

But the interview tapes showed that Starnes had misquoted Paige, making it seem as if the secretary favored promoting Christian values in public schools. Starnes was promptly fired by Baptist Press due to “factual and contextual errors” and “misrepresentations” in his reporting.

Such a public disgrace would be a career-ender for most journalists, but Starnes proved resilient. He was already working as director of university communications at Union University, a conservative Baptist college in Tennessee, by the time he was fired. Yet his tenure there was also short-lived for reasons that remain unclear.

“Todd served at Union for a very short time, and it was best for him to move on elsewhere,” said David Dockery, who was president at Union during Starnes’s tenure. When asked why he felt it was best for Starnes to move on, Dockery said that the problems were personal issues that he could not legally discuss.

After leaving Union, the reporter spent some time in radio at Sacramento’s KFBK before being called up to the big leagues. In January 2006—less than three years after Starnes was fired for misquoting the secretary of education—Fox News Radio hired him to work as overnight news anchor. But while his business cards changed, his behavior didn’t.

In April 2013, he reported that the Obama administration was engaging in a “Christian cleansing” by blocking military access to the website of his former employer, the Southern Baptist Convention. As it turns out, the denomination’s website was being blocked as Starnes reported, but not for the reasons he claimed. The site was merely blocked due to the detection of potential malware.

In September, Starnes reported that a proposed non-discrimination law in San Antonio would “force churches to have transgender bathrooms.” Politifact reviewed this claim and “found nothing in the law” to support it, which led to the website rating the claim as “false.”