Associated Press Issues Correction After Howard Kurtz Calls Out ‘Dishonest Piece’
The Associated Press issued a correction on Monday morning to a misleading report about a Howard Kurtz segment that drew the ire of the Fox News host.
The AP reported that on Kurtz’s Sunday show Media Buzz, “Fox News inadvertently posted a graphic showing it lagged other cable news networks in trustworthiness.”
The report seems to have been based on a misleading post from liberal blog Raw Story, which went viral on Sunday, and alleged that Kurtz “frantically implored his producer to take down a graphic that showed Fox is the least trusted of the big three cable networks.”
As Mediaite noted earlier today, the AP article failed to note that the reason Kurtz asked (calmly) for the graphic to be taken down was because it was displayed out of order — and he actually went on to cover the poll later on.
AP changed its headline and added the following note at the bottom of its story:
This story has been corrected to show that the graphic was taken down because it was used during the wrong segment, and was used again on the show.
The correction comes after Kurtz penned a blistering response to the AP report on Facebook demanding a correction.
“The Associated Press should be embarrassed by a story that utterly distorts what happened yesterday on my program Media Buzz,” Kurtz wrote. “And its dishonest piece was made worse by the fact that the wire service didn’t bother to contact me or Fox News for comment.”
“I felt viewers deserved all the facts,” the Media Buzz host concluded. “That’s more than I can say for the AP, which owes me a correction.”
Kurtz took note of the AP’s correction in a tweet:
The AP has now run a correction about my use of the poll graphic on Fox/Trump on #Mediabuzz. I appreciate it, but the sequence shouldn’t be attributed to me: There’s video!
— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) April 9, 2018
[image via screengrab]
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