Sunday evening New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a press conference to announce the NYPD had arrested a suspect in a terror plot, but in either a programming twist or weekend oversight, Fox News — unlike its other false reports recently — did not link the terror suspect to the Occupy Wall Street movement. To be clear, the arrested terror suspect, al-Qaida sympathizer Jose Pimentel, has absolutely no ties to the Occupy Wall Street movement, but a little fact like that wouldn’t ordinarily stop Fox from reporting otherwise.
READ:Â NYPD Police Chief’s Son Is Fox’s On-Air Anti-Occupy Wall Street Activist
For example, as The New York Times’s Brian Stelter reported, “on Thursday the Fox News affiliate in New York falsely reported that [Occupy Wall Street] protesters planned to “shut down†the subways.” Stelter added,
Attesting to the opinionated tone of much television coverage, Fox hosts and guests have described the protesters as a “group of nuts and lunatics and fascists†(Karl Rove), “demonic loons†(Ann Coulter) and “a bunch of wusses†(Greg Gutfeld).
Also on Thursday, Media Matters reported, “Fox & Friends claimed that alleged White House shooter Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez had been “tied to [the] Occupy” movement, even calling him the ” ‘Occupy’ shooter.” In fact, investigators have reportedly “found no connection between him and the Occupy protesters.”
Last month, Media Matters reported,
Fox News figures have called the Occupy Wall Street protests a “fringe” movement and have spent weeks attacking the protesters. But a new Time magazine poll shows that the protesters are supported by a majority of Americans, and their causes are supported by large majorities of the public — including, in some cases, by most Republicans.
Fox is widely-known for its faux reporting. In July, Fox News’ Eric Bolling said America was “safe between 2000 and 2008,” and added, “I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.†The September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania took place during that time period, as did the subsequent anthrax attacks.
Fox has been documented as under-reporting LGBT issues.
Fox has announced, “Obama Bin Laden Dead,” in May when Osama bin Laden was killed, and if you think that was a one-off mistake, the same day another Fox anchor announced, “President Obama Is In Fact Dead.”