Is Fox News’ religion reporter having a hard time separating facts, or is he just defaulting to incorrect information?
It’s no secret Fox News religion reporter Todd Starnes is anti-gay and a fan of anti-gay hate groups. It’s also no secret that his reporting is biased and all-too-often inaccurate.
Starnes has been taken to task by those he has wrongly reported on several times. For instance, during the War on Christmas of 2013, Starnes reported that “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. … The Christmas card censorship comes as the Bulloch County Board of Education cracks down on religious expression in their schools.”
Starnes’ piece, titled, “Georgia School Confiscates Christmas Cards,” was of course false – there was no secret war on Christmas cards or religious expression.
A local news channel did Starnes work for him, and some actual reporting.
“This year, due to a legitimate, personal privacy concern raised by one of the school’s staff members, [Principal] Baker moved the display to the opposite wall inside the office work room so that the staff member could still participate in the tradition,” the school district, attacked by Starnes fans, said in a statement to WSAV. “Baker wanted to respect the staff member’s privacy and that of his/her children depicted in the Christmas card.”
That statement also read, “Unfortunately, today the school was terrorized by an intentional and vicious dissemination of untrue information that disrupted the good work going on inside. 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.” [Bolding ours]
That’s just one example.Â
Media Matters today refers to Starnes as a serial misinformer, points to “Starnes’ consistently inaccurate ‘culture war’ reporting,” and offers as more evidence Starnes’ reporting on the now infamous case against Oregon baker Melissa Klein of Sweet Cakes By Melissa.
In his Fox News piece yesterday, “Christian bakers face government wrath for refusing to make cake for gay wedding,” Starnes writes, “Aaron and Melissa Klein refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, and now they must pay for their crime.”
The judge’s ruling paves the way for a March 10 hearing at which the Christian business owners could be ordered to pay $200,000 in fines and damages.
Wrong.
In the real world, the Kleins, through their lawyers, tried but failed to get a judgment in their favor and $200,000 in court costs and fees out of the same-sex couple they refused to serve.
Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI)Â Communications Director Charlie Burr gave Media Matters a statement denying Starnes’ reporting.
Todd Starnes is writing that the bakery owners face fines of up to $200,000 in damages. That’s false. In fact, it’s the Kleins who have asked for $200,000 in damages from our agency for our enforcement of the Equality Act. We rejected the request due to jurisdictional issues.
The agency’s prosecution unit is seeking up to $75,000 per person in damages, but no ruling on amounts has been made. [emphasis original]
Starnes also “asks” if the deciding official in the case, Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian, “wants to ship the Christians off to a government-sanctioned re-education camp?”
And he concludes, the “evidence seems to indicate that Christian business owners are being intentionally singled out for persecution. And it appears the courts are consistently ruling that gay rights trump everyone else’s rights.”
Anyone care to weigh the truth of that statement?Â
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