Fox & Friends Aggregates Gawker
[There was a video here]
Today’s episode of Fox News’ early morning variety hour, Fox & Friends, featured Gawker’s recent post about the ways in which Hillary Clinton’s press operation bends reporters to their will. You can watch Steve Doocy interview Judge Andrew Napolitano about the emails we published on Tuesday above.
One thing: At about 0:20, Napolitano suggests, incorrectly, that former Atlantic editor Marc Ambinder’s correspondence with Clinton’s press secretary Philippe Reines was first discovered and published by agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation: “I’m imagining the mentality of FBI agents going through her emails, and they’re finding rabbit holes, they’re finding something that’s fascinating, and they dig deeper, deeper, deeper, and they find an entirely new scandal involving her, totally different from ‘are there top-secret emails on her server?’”
In fact, the emails were released under the Freedom of Information Act—at least once a district court judge in Washington, D.C. forced the State Department to follow the law—several years after Gawker filed a request for them in 2012. They were never the subject of any F.B.I. investigation.
A second thing: For reasons that may or may not be obvious, Fox & Friends declined to mention or credit Gawker in this morning’s segment. Which we point out here if only to highlight the discord between Fox News’ interest in this particular journalistic standard, or any journalistic standard, and the fact that this segment omitted or misreported the origins of the actual story, and where the information therein came from.
A third thing: Interestingly, Andrea Tantaros of Fox’s afternoon talk show Outnumbered did credit Gawker, and correctly identified the source the emails we published, in a segment that aired yesterday:
[There was a video here]
Thank you, Andrea.
Email the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · Video credits: Fox News