Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com
In an unusual twist, Fox News actually reported on something accurately Sunday — just not on purpose.
The inadvertently honest moment took place during a segment on Fox News’ “Media Buzz,” when host Howard Kurtz accidentally showed a graph revealing that Fox is the least trusted of any major cable news network.
Kurtz was speaking to conservative pollster Frank Luntz, who warned that Republicans are in danger of losing both chambers of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.
Among other things, Luntz pointed to Trump’s tweets as one cause of the problems facing the Republican party.
“He should be focused on the economy and taxes and not ‘fake news,’” Luntz said.
“Speaking of fake news, there is a new poll out from Monmouth University. ‘Do the media report fake news regularly or occasionally?’ 77 percent say yes —” Kurtz said, as a graphic appeared onscreen.
But instead of showing the results of the ‘fake news’ poll, the graphic showed the brutally honest results of a question about Americans’ trust in news sources — or lack of trust, in the case of Fox News.
“That is not the graphic we are looking for. Hold off,” Kurtz said as he realized the mistake. “Take that down, please.”
The hilarious mishap is not without precedent.
Last year, Trump suggested that there should be a contest for which news outlet is considered least trustworthy by the American public. The right-leaning polling firm Rasmussen took him up on the idea and conducted a poll on Americans’ trust in various media outlets.
The poll found that Fox News was the clear winner of Trump’s so-called Fake News Trophy, with 40 percent of Americans saying that Fox is the leader in fake news, followed by CNN at 25 percent, and MSNBC at just 9 percent.
Other outlets — like ABC, CBS, and NBC — were each selected by less than five percent of respondents.
Perhaps after today’s accidentally honest coverage, trust in Fox News will go up a notch or two.
On second thought, maybe not.
