[UPDATED, below.]
Fox News' Neil Cavuto has gone on the defensive lately, defending his network's coverage of the coming political fringe tax day Renaissance Faires known as Tea Parties. Naturally, no one in the wide world is reasonably disputing that Fox is out of bounds in covering the Teabaggers. The more stringent objections lie with Fox's decision to promote and support these events. But this is what they want to spend their capital on, I suppose!
Anyway, what Cavuto shouldn't be allowed to do is, you know ... make stuff up, and yet there he was, this past Saturday, saying the following:
CAVUTO: Just a reminder, we are going to be right in the middle of these protests because at FOX we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March, even though, as I pointed out, it turned out to be well shy of a million men. We were there for the Iraq War protest, and the protest against the Iraq War protest. So see, we really don't decide what populist causes matter. Just that when a whole lot of people gather, in a whole lot of towns and cities across America, it is indeed worth checking out, not just shutting down. Which is why we are in Sacramento on April 15 for the one of the biggest of these, at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time.
[WATCH.]
Unfortunately for Cavuto, the people at NewsHounds did one of those things where you go and you "look up" the available facts and "verify" them for "accuracy."
Neil Cavuto has been defending FOX News' coverage of the upcoming tax day tea parties by repeatedly suggesting that FOX News gave similar coverage to the Million Man March. But the Million Man March occurred October 16, 1995 whereas FOX News was not operating until October 7, 1996, nearly a year later.
This should make for a very awkward correction.
UPDATE:
Okay. We hear the erroneous segment, which has FOX covering an event that occurred before the network was founded, was an error made by Cavuto during taping on Thursday. At some point after that, Cavuto realized or regretted his error and began noting the distinction between the original Million Man March, and its follow-up marches, which Fox was around to cover.
Here's a video in which such a distinction was made:
From there, the erroneous report - taped Thursday, pre-regret/realization - ran on Saturday, For some reason uncorrected.
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