An inside look at how Fox News ‘reports’ the ‘news’

Yesterday afternoon, Fox News, which rarely breaks stories of its own, seemed to have a juicy campaign scoop — James Carville and Paul Begala, architects of Bill Clinton’s campaign victories, were leaving their jobs at CNN to help turn around Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. We’d heard quite a bit lately about a significant staff shake-up, and this would be quite a development.

Except, of course, it wasn’t true at all. Fox News ran the report without even asking Carville and Begala for comment, and both were quick to set the record straight. Carville told Greg Sargent, for example, “Fox was, is and will continue to be an asinine and ignorant network.” Shortly thereafter, Begala was equally emphatic.

This isn’t one of those gray-area stories where’s there’s a kernel of truth that ends up exaggerated. In other words, let’s say Carville and Begala hosted an informal strategy chat with Hillary and some of her top aides about how to proceed after New Hampshire. Fox News heard about a meeting, extrapolated, and then exaggerated.

But that’s just it — there was no meeting, there were no discussions, Carville and Begala haven’t had any connection to the Clinton campaign at all. Fox News’ scoop was bogus.

Today, Begala has a fascinating take on his efforts to correct the record, and Fox News’ reluctance to embrace the journalistic standards of a junior high-school newspaper.

Fox News never even tried to contact me to verify their story, and when I contacted Fox, I felt like a character in a Kafka novel — or at least Curb Your Enthusiasm. Fox’s Major Garrett — a good guy whom I’ve known for years — broke the story. My phone started ringing off the hook, and my email box bulged. There are still, thank goodness, a lot of real journalists out there. Tim Russert was first. I assured him it wasn’t true, he thanked me for waving him off a false story, and that was that. Then my own network, CNN, called. I told them if I were quitting CNN that CNN would know before Fox News. Soon after, others called or emailed: Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, George Stephanopoulos and Teddy Davis of ABC, Beth Fouhy of AP, Mark Halperin of Time, John Harris of the Politico, Jill Lawrence of USA Today, Peter Baker of the Washington Post, Patrick Healy of the New York Times, David Gregory of NBC and Bill Sammon of the Examiner. There were probably more. I list the names only to give credit to journalists who behaved like reporters, not repeaters. After I told Fox it wasn’t true — and this is the surreal part — they kept reporting it anyway. In fact, Fox’s Garrett told me he’d “take it under advisement.” Take it under advisement?

Generally, professional journalists don’t take the truth “under advisement”; they take it to their audience.



The good news is, Fox News altered its story after Begala pushed back. The bad news is, the Republican network made it worse.

I realize I’m generally seen as just another liberal with an opinion, but this was not a matter of opinion, it was a matter of fact. Fox now knew their story was flatly, factually wrong, and they took it “under advisement.” Apparently that meant repeating the falsehood with added detail: the “fact” that I had been on a conference call the previous day with the Hillary high command. Again, false. My worry is that if this is what one of Fox’s best and most respected reporters is doing, what are the hacks up to?

Good question. The answer, I’m afraid, is that no one who works at Fox News should be “respected” as a “reporter” at all. If they care about their credibility, they wouldn’t work at a propaganda outlet.

Begala posted the entire email exchange with Fox’s Major Garrett. Fascinating stuff.