The left will never miss an opportunity to bash Fox News, so Huffington Post received a video clip, which later they found to be doctored, but they ran with it.
The original inaccurate post said:
At the end of a long and pointless conversation between two Fox News reporters covering a zoo escape, John Gibson compared Attorney General Eric Holder to a monkey.
A monkey escaped from the Woodland park Zoo in Seattle and despite the fact that authorities are "taking this very seriously," Julie Banderas and Harris Faulkner were not, cracking jokes about the monkeys' bright blue scrotum.
At 2:48, they toss to John Gibson who complains that he can't get away with saying "bright blue scrotum" on the radio then follows that up by saying, "We were talking about Eric Holder today on the radio and his bright blue scrotum."
They then showed a doctored video, and afterward updated their post with this retraction.
UPDATE: The Huffington Post has learned that the below video has been doctored. We regret the error and apologize to Mr. Gibson. John Gibson never compared Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum.
Rather, as seen in the unedited video below, Gibson played audio of Holder saying "nation of cowards" -- so his full, unedited remarks were:
"We were talking about Eric Holder today on the radio and his comment that this is a nation of cowards."
The video was doctored to include Trace Gallagher's voice saying, "bright blue scrotum" where Gibson played Holder's "nation of cowards" remark. The Huffington Post does not know the source of the video's doctoring — it was picked up off TVNewser.
Now while Huffpo, did offer a correction, others had already picked up on the initial piece.
Examples below.
DailyKos:
Well, here we go. Apparently we're going to need federal legislation to prohibit conservatives from even discussing monkeys, using the word "monkey" or any such thing because for the 2nd day in a row we have a conservative, this times the horrible John Gibson of FOX News, putting his foot into his mouth and down his throat with a comment suggesting that a notable African American is a monkey.
Don't believe me? Watch the following clip
Wonkette:
Fox News lady: “I’ve got a picture of what the monkey would look like — we’re waiting for some live video of the search to come in — and it’s my screensaver now, Jim… I want you to take a look at that, that’s what we’re dealing with, that’s what they can look like when they’re upset. They’re known because the males have bright blue scrotums.” One minute later, John Gibson: Eric Holder has a bright blue scrotum, haw haw haw.
Johnny Dollar has some other examples, so go take a look at the type of snowballing a fake story can gather and the the correction, gets small mentions.
Kudos to Huffpo for issuing an update, but it might be better to check, verify, confirm and then if something has proven untrue, at least you will have done your due diligence.
Right now it simply appears to be sloppy and being too quick on the trigger because it was Fox News, so why bother taking the time to make sure it is correct?
Your ridiculous item of the day!!
This has started generating some reactions today, found at Memeorandum.
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