Voice Of Post

Fox news facts, Where does Fox News get its facts? I could show you, but we’d need an extra-powerful flashlight and several cocktails to loosen up Steve Doocy.

Now that I’ve ruined your day by putting the thought of that horrifying, hypothetical spelunking excursion in your head, let me hit you with a totally unsurprising and predictable bit of information: Fox is making headlines this week for a wildly inaccurate assertion made on its air.

In other news, sky is blue, grass is green, dog bites man.

But something about this one has resonated. This time it was so obviously, demonstratively false, that it cut through the usual stink cloud of dubious accuracy that hovers over Fox at all times, and caused international outrage as opposed to just tweaking American liberals.

The falsehood came courtesy of terrorism “expert” Steven Emerson, who stated on Sunday that the British city of Birmingham was “totally Muslim” and that non-Muslims simply did not enter the city. Of course, this came as news to the roughly 80% of Brummies who are not Muslim.

When I was a producer at Fox, Emerson was notorious among producers for firing off email blasts making outrageous allegations about Muslims and offering himself as a guest to discuss said allegations. He was actually a member of the small, exclusive club of guests that Bill O’Reilly considered too risky or extreme to appear on The O’Reilly Factor. (Some other members of that club: Michelle Malkin, Bill Maher and occasionally Ann Coulter, depending on Bill’s mood.)

The normal response for Factor producers after receiving one of Emerson’s pitches was an eye roll and the delete key. But other programs at the network apparently have no such filter in place. For some hosts and producers at a network that traffics in outrage and over-the-top, factually questionable claims, Emerson is an irresistible guest. So it was that Emerson found himself a guest on Sean Hannity’s show just last week, as a warm-up of sorts for the mind-boggling inaccuracies he would uncork on Sunday.

The host of that particular show was Jeanine Pirro, a former judge and district attorney who was deemed bombastic enough to gain a toehold at Fox several years ago, despite her crippling handicap of being neither blonde nor routinely coherent. Luckily for Pirro, Fox is a place where incoherence can be overcome by sheer volume alone. Welcome to Fox News Channel, where if you shout enough, people will eventually think you’re making sense, even if all other signs point to the contrary!

Pirro’s biggest crime, aside from hosting Emerson in the first place, was not challenging him when he asserted his prima facie absurd statement about Birmingham. There are several explanations for why she didn’t do so, none of which reflect well on her. It’s possible that she simply didn’t know enough about the UK to realise the ridiculousness of what Emerson was claiming. Another possibility is that she recognised that his facts weren’t straight, but agreed enough with the basic thrust of his argument (“Muslims = bad + scary”) that she didn’t feel the need to challenge him.

The most charitable explanation is that Pirro simply didn’t register what Emerson was saying. Anyone who has ever been a guest on cable news knows that this is entirely possible – the typical 3-to-5 minute cable segment comes and goes so quickly that sometimes it’s only possible to think about what one is going to say next. There’s no time or mental bandwidth to process what was said by the other participants in the segment.

The last explanation points to a broader problem in cable news. Factual errors happen in journalism, as Rolling Stone magazine famously found out late last year. But unlike print or (increasingly) online journalism, cable news in general – and Fox News in particular – does not have dedicated fact checkers or a strongly-enforced correction policy, and errors routinely make it on the air.

Fox does have a fact-finding department – an operation that goes by the Orwellian name “The Brain Room” – but it acts as more of a research arm. They assist in preparing pre-segment “packets” of info for hosts and producers, but have no oversight of the on-air product. There is no mechanism in place to correct errors and misinformation, whether it comes from a Fox host, contributor or guest.

Fox’s competitors CNN and MSNBC seem much quicker to police themselves. Fox, taking a cue from its pugilistic leader Roger Ailes, rarely admits mistakes, wary of overtly giving fodder to its critics. Occasionally, if the outcry is large enough, Fox will issue a reluctant, mealy-mouthed correction, but more often than not the transgression goes uncorrected and unacknowledged.

I’m curious to see what happens with the Birmingham story. Emerson’s error has already been corrected – first by a wave of internet mockery that got the hashtag #foxnewsfacts trending, and then by Emerson himself, in a BBC interview Monday. But so far, Fox News, which gave Emerson a platform and allowed him to spew inaccuracies unchallenged, has not issued a correction. It’s unclear if they’re waiting until next weekend when Pirro is back on air so she can do it herself, or, if they’ll just – like so many factual inaccuracies before – let it stand without comment.