Saturday, October 30, 2010

Steve Doocy Lies On Air, Fox News Looks The Other Way...

An article by Will Guzzardi for The Huffington Post was very interesting on Friday - it detailed how Fox News lied on television, with "Fox and Friends" host Steve Doocy making false claims and instead of having an expert or someone knowledgeable of the situation on the show, he interviewed a partisan reporter from The Washington Times.
FOX News continues stoking the fires of incendiary campaign rhetoric, this time asserting verifiable falsehoods about absentee ballots in Chicago.

On a "Fox & Friends" segment Thursday morning, host Steve Doocy asked if "inmates [were] taking priority over American soldiers," while the banner below him screamed, "INMATES VOTE, TROOPS DON'T."

Doocy claimed that ballots were "hand-delivered" to inmates at the Cook County Jail, while absentee ballots weren't sent on time to American soldiers serving abroad.

Rather than bringing on a Chicago reporter to discuss the facts of the case, or asking the Board of Elections for comment, the show interviewed Quinn Hillyer of the Washington Times, a paper whose name almost makes it sound non-partisan. "It's awful," Hillyer said. "What it comes down to is, felons vote, soldiers don't. At least that seems to be the attitude in Cook County, Illinois."

Trouble with Doocy's claims: they're all patently false.

It is true, as he says leading off the segment, that 35 counties were, to some degree, late in send out absentee ballots to military personnel.

Cook County was not one of them. In fact, according to a press release from the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, Cook County overseas ballots were sent out by September 3, more than two weeks ahead of the federal deadline.

In 24 of the 35 counties in question, fewer than 10 absentee ballots were requested. In the most egregious case, St. Clair County in the southwestern part of the state sent out 1,274 absentee ballots on October 4, roughly two weeks after the deadline. But all of Cook County's 7,163 overseas soldiers will indeed have the chance to vote, contrary to Hillyer's complaint.

What's more, the claim about ballots being hand-delivered to prisoners also turns out to be pretty suspect.
Where are Fox's retractions?  Isn't it interesting they jump on every other media institution out there, with their pundits calling for this or that, but when they are caught with their pants down they do nothing - no wonder why Fox's viewers support the tea party and believe Obama is a Muslim...

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