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Fox News didn’t investigate its Seth Rich coverage like it promised, so all this week @mmfa is doing it for the network.
Here's our first installment, on Malia Zimmerman's original May 16, 2017, online report. mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/1…
Here's our first installment, on Malia Zimmerman's original May 16, 2017, online report. mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/1…
@mmfa The story was worse than I remembered. Fox relied on a single anonymous "federal investigator" from an unnamed agency and basically no corroborating evidence to publish the claim that Rich had given tens of thousands of emails to WikiLeaks.
It published private investigator Rod Wheeler's claim that the DNC or Clinton might be behind a coverup, with no evidence as to why he thought that (he later claimed that quote was fabricated, which is either very bad for Fox or proof he isn't credible).
For the claim that Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks, the story relied on the unnamed investigator who claimed to have read an FBI report that included their emails. The story claimed Wheeler corroborated that source, but didn't indicate how he was able to do so...
And he would later say that everything he knew about the WikiLeaks communications came from Zimmerman's FBI source via Zimmerman, and that his quote to that effect had been fabricated.
Based on those two sources -- one anonymous, one discredited -- Fox published a story pushing back against the U.S. intelligence community’s findings that Russian intelligence agents had hacked the DNC and given the emails to WikiLeaks.
It was terrible, Fox had to retract it, they promised to investigate what went wrong, and they haven't. So two years after the story's publication we're doing it for them, all this week.
One last point: Fox typically responds to criticism of its "opinion" hosts by pointing to the good journalism of its "news" side. But while Sean Hannity and others on the "opinion" side got most of the criticism over Rich, it was fundamentally a project of the "news" side.
It was the "news" side that published a ludicrously thin story pushing a conspiracy theory. And two years later, no one has been held responsible for it.
