not just Faux, but incompetent

[dichroic]

Fox News is famous for letting its conservative bias affect its news reporting; I hadn’t realized they were also incompetent in matters of basic journalism. I did a bit of Googling to check whether my parents were likely to be without power due to Hurricane Sandy (they weren’t when I spoke to them last night, but that’s hours ago and the storm has made landfall since then.) I found this in the Fox News story on the storm:

“In eastern Pennsylvania, outages affecting more than 367,175 customers were reported by PPL Electric. Scattered outages were reported in the Pittsburgh area by PECO.”

Pittsburgh is not in Eastern Pennsylvania! Sandy is big enough that Pgh might see some storm damage too, but it’s not going to be hit the way cities further east were. The acronym PECO originally stood for Philadelphia Electric Company, and PPL Electric serves central and eastern Pennsylvania. I would certainly expect a major news outlet to be able to tell the difference between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia – the 300 miles between them might be a clue.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Comments

[wordweaverlynn]

*facepalm*

Pittsburgh is the one with the Steelers. Philadelphia is the one with the Iggles.

[bombasticat]

I've come to realize that Fox isn't just full of bias; they also do extremely, extremely lax vetting, if any. A client at the place I work at was interviewed on Fox and Friends last month. The running text claimed he was from a university other than the one he actually has tenure at. AND, the person interviewing him about his book hadn't read the book and thought it was shoring up creationists. When he had done the opposite.

There were a couple other errors in the running text, as well, but I can't remember them off-hand.

So they fail on two points: ideological spin and a complete and utter disregard for any fact-checking outside of ideology.