Fisking Roger Ailes...

The Atlantic Wire’s John Hudson examines Roger Ailes’ claim yesterday that FNC had never taken a story down because it was wrong and finds it wanting…

Last night, Fox News president Roger Ailes told an audience at the University of North Carolina’s Journalism School that in “15 years we have never taken a story down because it was wrong,” according to an account by New York’s Gabriel Sherman. That’s quite the fib.

While some might quibble over the definition of “wrong” or “taken down,” Fox News, like its competitors, has certainly removed false or embarrassing stories from its website and retracted reports it aired on TV, as some on Twitter have pointed out. Behold:

In 2002, then Fox News anchor Brit Hume reported that PETA’s Ohio branch decided to dress the state’s deer population in orange vests to protect them from hunters, which in turn prompted some hunters to offer a reward to those who “bag vested deer and bring home the vests,” a development that had state officials “worried that the whole vest competition could get someone shot.” As the American Journalism Review reported, the story was untrue. “Hume apologized the next day and retracted the story, but not before the Wall Street Journal and ESPN posted the juicy-sounding tidbit on their Web sites.” That’s a clear cut case.

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