First on Fox, Then on AP! Although At Lleast AP Had the Decency to Issue a Correction!
ON UPDATE: Hastert Also Labelled a DEM by AP!
By Brad Friedman on 10/4/2006, 12:52pm PT  

It looks like AP picked up on Fox's "error" yesterday in labelling Mark Foley as a Democrat!

From Josh Marshall today...

Good Old Associated Press ...

[Dobson] touched on the uproar over former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, D-Florida, who resigned Friday in a scandal over electronic messages he sent to former teenage male congressional pages.

The party affiliation that dare not speak its name.

Late Update: As of about 12:18 PM, the version of the AP story I linked to at the San Jose Mercury News has been corrected. But it must have been what the AP sent out over the wire. So I'm sure there are million more examples of it still out there.

Indeed Josh would appear to be correct. As of a quick Google search moments ago, there were still several articles indexed as showing Foley as a "(D-Florida)":

The stories listed by Google above now seem to have corrected the text in their online versions. No clue how many actually made it into newsprint that way.

Several of the outlets who ran AP's original "Foley is a Dem" version now have this correction notice at the bottom of their articles:

Correction: This story originally referenced Rep. Mark Foley as a Democrat. He is a Republican. The AP ran a similar correction 3 hours after it first moved on the wire.

To our knowledge, no such admission has been issued by either O'Reilly or Fox "News", despite having run the most egregious version of this "error" (three times in total) during the initial primetime broadcast of The O'Reilly Factor last night as we originally reported just after it aired. They simply scrubbed the "error" by removing that title card during the later re-broadcasts of the program (the ones with the smaller viewerships).

(Hat-tip Joseph Cannon)

UPDATE: Eagle-eyed BRAD BLOG commenter "Fred T" notes that Hastert is also labelled as a Democrat in the AP story listed in the Google search graphic above!

UPDATE 10/10/06 4:52pm PT: Now NewsMax.com says Foley a "Democrat"!...

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