Originally published at: Fox News refuses to apologize for fabricated story about dead Marine whose sole source was a Florida congressman | Boing Boing
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Clearly, they learned a lot from that nearly billion dollar payout… /s
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… why bother with “real” grievances when you can just make shit up 
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Well, it’s worked well for Fox for the last 26 years, so…
I guess, if they learned anything, it was to only lie about entities who they can be sure won’t sue them.
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I for one, hope that Fox News and the rest of the American fascists continue to alienate the military and federal law enforcement. It’s kinda an existential necessity that they do if we want these coups to continue to fail.
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Evidently the backlash got bad enough they finally did hork up an apology.
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Imagine if every single question from a Fox reporter to a member of the Marine Corps was met with “No comment” or “We only answer questions from reputable news organizations.”
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Of course, the damage is done already and Fox knows it, which is why they don’t care. Conservative Facebook groups and whatever will pass this story around for years to come, further enraging and consolidating the faithful. My dad tells me stories like this at dinner all the time and I have to say over and over, “Dad, that just isn’t true. That story is made up.”. Even coming from me, it rarely shakes his resolve to believe. At best, he falls back to, “well something untoward happened there” which of course is impossible to argue against. When in doubt, make sure your beliefs are unfalsifiable.
Nobody remembers the apologies and the corrections that come later. Tell a lie people want to believe and that is all they will remember. Fox knows this.
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Yeah, I get a very similar “well it’s the kind of thing that Obama/Clinton/Biden could/would have done, so you know something is going on.”
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There is also the whole “People are talking about it (the untrue story), so we should too and speculate” thing that they do on the more mainstream side of the media.
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“The now unpublished story has been addressed internally and we sincerely apologize to the Gee family,”
That’s a whole new meaning to the word ‘unpublished’.
It was published, the lie was knowingly promoted and spread around the World. Fox remains a sewer.
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It might be helpful if a platoon visited the reporter to explain why his work was so repugnant.
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I’m old enough to remember that during Watergate, the phrase “No longer operative,” was used when the White House wanted to walk back a previous statement as if they never said it.
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Republicans love a prop in uniform…
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I’m a little surprised that Fox would have assumed that the Marine Corps would take the matter lying down.
They knew that the story was juicy precisely because it was a tale of a cynical, high-handed betrayal of the sort of ideals that help motivate military forces(and people in general; it’s not like wasting resources on funerary goods is basically on the list of ‘behaviorally modern humans’ because people don’t care about the handling of the dead); and (I would, perhaps incorrectly, have thought) would know that for exactly that reason the Marine Corps would be loathe to let that go unchallenged; of of some combination of sincere disgust at the assertion that they would treat one of theirs in such a way and the calculating awareness that those juicy E-1 paychecks aren’t going to provide sufficient motivation, in isolation, if there’s a belief that marines are disrespected and seen as expendable by the corps.
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Having been an enlisted member of the USAF, I was greatly amused by that phrase! (I mean, in a “I knew service people who’s families were on food stamps” kind of amusement, of course.)
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