Welcome to the world of Todd Starnes, the radical religious right, and Fox News “journalism.”
Todd Starnes is Fox News‘ religion reporter. He appears on the Fox News channel as a reporter and commentator, on Fox News Radio, and writes a daily column there as well. Starnes regularly drums up faux outrage over perceived wars on religion — Christianity, mostly, never on Islam — perceived wars against religious military service members by atheists or secular society, perceived wars on Christmas, and he regularly attacks President Barack Obama.
To say that Starnes occasionally operates in tandem with anti-gay hate groups like the American Family Association and the Family Research Council is not much of a stretch.
Here, a few of Starnes’ recent columns:
Did Obama Compare Gettysburg Address to “Will and Grace�
Did Radio Shack Censor Christmas?
You Won’t Believe How Obama is Celebrating Christmas
Christians Call for Military to End Harassment of Evangelicals
Yesterday, Starnes, who apparently is subject to no responsible oversight or editor, published “Georgia School Confiscates Christmas Cards,” claiming:
For as long as anyone can remember, teachers at Brooklet Elementary School have posted Christmas cards in the hallways outside their classrooms – until Monday.
When boys and girls returned from Thanksgiving break, they discovered that their teachers’ Christmas cards had been removed – under orders from the Georgia school’s administration.
Robb Kicklighter’s wife is a third grade teacher at the school. He said many teachers are disgruntled by the school’s decision to confiscate the Christmas cards.
“They took down the cards so the kids can’t see them,†he told me. “Some of the cards had the word ‘Christmas’ and some had Nativity scenes.â€
The Christmas card censorship comes as the Bulloch County Board of Education cracks down on religious expression in their schools.
But of course, despite Fox News having 17 bureaus around the world, and being a large revenue generator of Rupert Murdoch‘s $33.7 billion News Corp. empire, Starnes just didn’t have the time, staff, or gumption to pick up a telephone and actually call the school to get that “fair and balanced” story that would have forced him to look elsewhere for more faux evidence of the fake “war on Christmas.”
Ignoring who might become the victim of his journalistic malfeasance, Starnes went ahead and pushed “publish.”
But NBC affiliate WSAV did have a few “extra” minutes to do Starnes’ homework.
WSAV learned that one of the teachers had made a personal privacy request, for personal reasons, to not have her personal Christmas cards shared with the school children. Remember, these aren’t cards by the children or for the children, they are personal cards to the school staff.
“The decision to move the poster had nothing, absolutely nothing, at all to do with any type of religious conversation that is going on in the county,” Principal Marlin Baker told WSAV.
The school district was forced to issue a statement defending the action — as if they have nothing better to do than clean up after a reporter on a fake mission doing a bad job.
“Unfortunately, today the school was terrorized by an intentional and vicious dissemination of untrue information that disrupted the good work going on inside,” the statement reads. “Fox News Radio Commentary Host Todd Starnes, acting on misinformation that neither he, nor his media outlet corroborated with the school system or Baker, misreported a story about student Christmas Cards being removed from the school. Baker did not receive any questions from the local community either.”
The cards in question were not student Christmas cards, nor were they a student project or tradition. The cards are the personal family Christmas cards that faculty members share with one another. They are the personal cards from their homes that they would send to family and friends.
It has been a faculty tradition to post the cards on a small display board made of two pieces of red and green poster paper. The display in the past was posted in hallway outside the office workroom.
This year, due to a legitimate, personal privacy concern raised by one of the school’s staff members, Baker moved the display to the opposite wall inside the office work room so that the staff member could still participate in the tradition. Baker wanted to respect the staff member’s privacy and that of his/her children depicted in the Christmas card.
So, of course you’re assuming that Starnes of Fox News issued an apology and pulled the story, or corrected it sufficiently to fix his “error,” right?
Wrong.
While the article now states, “*This story has been updated,” the title remains, “Georgia School Confiscates Christmas Cards,” and it’s entirely unclear exactly how the story was updated, as Starnes didn’t bother to explain. There’s a short snippet of the school district’s press release, which conveniently does nothing to dispel his Christmas myth.
Welcome to the world of Todd Starnes, the radical religious right, and Fox News “journalism.”
UPDATE: Apparently, Starnes is syndicated at Town Hall, a highly-trafficked site similar to Breitbart and WND. A similar version of his column now appears there, sans any update. A link and synopsis of his article was also syndicated by the Alliance Defending Freedom, so the damage is done, many times over.
WSAV: News, Weather, and Sports for Savannah, GA
Hat tip: The Raw Story