Insider
Right-wing media, most prominently Fox News, has promoted three major false stories in the past few days.
Last Friday, the New York Post published a cover story claiming that copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2019 children’s book, “Superheroes Are Everywhere,” were being gifted to migrant children at a Department of Health and Human Services shelter in Long Beach, California. The Post provided no evidence for the claim aside from a single Reuters photograph of Harris’ book propped against a backpack on a table.
The story was picked up by a host of right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, which coauthored a follow-up story with Laura Italiano, the Post reporter who wrote the original piece. A slew of prominent Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Tom Cotton and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, promoted the Post’s story.
But the Post’s story was quickly debunked. The Washington Post fact-checker, which gave the Post story “four Pinocchios” on Tuesday, reported that the Post based its entire story on a photo of one copy of the book donated to the shelter by a community member. The Post deleted its two stories on the matter and later republished them with corrections and editors’ notes added.
It wasn’t the only story that right-wing media got wrong.
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