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Fox passes off GOP press release as its own research -- typo and all


@DCGoldPants

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http://mediamatters.org/items/200902100019?f=h_top

Summary: In purporting to "take a look back" at how the economic recovery plan "grew, and grew, and grew," Fox News' Jon Scott referenced seven dates, as on-screen graphics cited various news sources from those time periods -- all of which came directly from a Senate Republican Communications Center press release. A Fox News on-screen graphic even reproduced a typo contained in the Republican press release.

The link has screenshots and everything.

Too funny.....and kind of sad.

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Seeing as how FOX and the Republican party are one and the same and have interchangable parts, I'm not sure it's all that misleading.

On the scale of past Republican hack journalism, this doesn't rank very high. Keep in mind, this is a group of partisans who concocted a calculated effort to invent and spread rumors that they knew were false about Obama's wife so as to impact the Democratic primary in a desirable way for Republicans.

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This is mostly about being lazy and not necessarily rotten. I've certainly used info in press releases to help me write the intros to my features... mind you, I do fact check and spell check :D

The worst of this to me is that the press release is supposed to be a slightly sensationalized pitch and not a story. Sensationalized because you want to get a news desk, news director excited and get people assigned to cover your event or story. There are times when using the press release as a source makes a lot of sense, but those are usually press releases for announcements of a state fair or convention or something.

If it's how many vendors, what kind of food, when, where, and how... you can steal much of it, but even then you need to talk to people and verify it and expound on it.

Obviously, if they reported this as news from the GOP's perspective it would be a nearly legitimate story. However, best practice would still be to conduct an interview or two even if they all with people arranged by the guy sending out the release.

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Seeing as how FOX and the Republican party are one and the same and have interchangable parts, I'm not sure it's all that misleading.

On the scale of past Republican hack journalism, this doesn't rank very high. Keep in mind, this is a group of partisans who concocted a calculated effort to invent and spread rumors that they knew were false about Obama's wife so as to impact the Democratic primary in a desirable way for Republicans.

ha.. I 100% agree with the Repub hack journalism statement, but don't sit there and say the other 90% of the media (which is liberal) is any different.

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ha.. I 100% agree with the Repub hack journalism statement, but don't sit there and say the other 90% of the media (which is liberal) is any different.

90% is different. Press Releases are used to pitch story and may provide info in the story, but they should never "be" the story.

Now, I'd also argue (or at least hope) that this isn't SOP for FOX.

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ha.. I 100% agree with the Repub hack journalism statement, but don't sit there and say the other 90% of the media (which is liberal) is any different.

Lou Dobbs on CNN had an entire segment yesterday called "The Road to Socialism." Openly talking about how this stimulus bill was a road to socialism.

The NYT ran a devastating Op-Ed piece on Tom Daschle the day before he stepped down. It has been wildly reported that the editorial criticizing him was one of the reasons he called Obama to remove his name for consideration.

Please find me anything like these two examples from the past 2 weeks, that FoxNews has done but liberal leaning.

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