Statement to E&P Claims 'Honest Mistake' But Not Worth Noting to Viewers Apparently, Since 'Everyone Knows' Foley is a Republican...
By Brad Friedman on 10/6/2006, 3:05pm PT  

Editor & Publisher published a comment today from the Executive Producer of Fox "News'" O'Reilly Factor on their having run a title under video of Rep. Mark Foley --- three different times, in two different segments --- which labeled the now-disgraced, now-former Republican Congressman as a Democrat:

"Once it came to our attention, we removed the incorrect chyron immediately," said David Tabacoff, executive producer of the Fox News Channel show hosted by Bill O'Reilly, who also does a newspaper column distributed by Creators Syndicate. "We didn't run a correction per se."
...
Tabacoff told E&P late Thursday that "everyone knows" Foley --- who resigned his House seat after revelations that he sent sexually charged messages to teen Congressional pages --- is a Republican. So "The O'Reilly Factor," he said, didn't feel it was necessary to run a specific on-air correction on its Wednesday show. But Tabacoff emphasized that when Foley was pictured on "The O'Reilly Factor" after Tuesday, he was correctly identified as a Republican.

"It was an honest mistake," Tabacoff said of the Tuesday mislabeling.

The BRAD BLOG orginally broke the story of Fox's egregious "error" last Tuesday.

We followed up with a report on AP having done a similar thing the next day, though they had the journalistic integrity (unlike Fox "News") to issue a correction statement when the problem was found.

Yesterday ran we ran another follow-up on O'Reilly and Fox's failure to publicly correct or even acknowledge the "error," indisputably closing any further debate on whether Fox is actually a news organization. It isn't. We included links to videos of both The Daily Show's and MSNBC Countdown's coverage of same in that last report.

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

UPDATE 2/8/08: Fox now shows presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain also as a Democrat! Screenshot...

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