Hey, Doocy apologized for fabricating part of Obama’s speech!
A few days ago my friend Michael Thaddeus wrote a guest post after noticing that Fox News reporter Steve Doocy had added three words, “Unlike some people,” to Obama’s line “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”
This fabrication had the effect of making Obama appear to be making a snide reference to Romney. Indeed Doocy was talking to Romney on Fox News when he added the words. But the truth was that Obama had been saying the silver spoon line since 2009, as Thaddeus pointed out.
Moreover, the Washington Post and New York Post had picked up the line verbatim from Doocy, rather than checking the original source, and when Thaddeus had contacted them they had ignored his complaints. So that’s when he asked me to put up his guest post, which I did.
And what’s super cool is that it was picked up by a bunch of people who linked to my blog (ISPN Media, Deep Brain Media, Brobrubel’s blog, The Fifth Column, and FAIR), and quite a bit of twitter buzz for what I’m used to.
A bunch of other media outlets also picked this up who didn’t link to my blog (which is kind of ironic considering the post is about doing your job as a journalist) including USA Today, Media Matters, and the Daily Kos, after which the Washington Post corrected its Obama quote.
After that, the story got onto Talking Points Memo, and didn’t link to my blog but was attributed to Michael Thaddeus which later got shortened to MT for some reason. It was even the top story on Talking Points Memo for some time Sunday afternoon.
The ultimate (in terms of my kids thinking I’m cool) happened Monday evening though when the story was featured on the Colbert Report. Cool!
Oh yeah, and Doocy finally apologized on Fox News.
Blogging isn’t dead, people!!
mathbabe 
Cathy, I’m sure your kids already knew that you’re about as cool as as a person could be anyway.
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Awww…. actually, no. I’m pretty lame in their book. I recently heard my son singing Adele’s “Someone Like You” and I joined in, whereupon he told me I’d “ruined that song for him forever.” Just saying.
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Even the New York Post corrected its editorial on Monday afternoon after
the flurry of blog posts. Apparently that’s what it takes. I did write a
letter to the Post, but of course they didn’t publish it. Instead, they
published a letter saying “Obama’s criticism is one of the most anti-American statements by any president in our country’s history.”
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Awesome, Cathy! That Colbert Report segment is hilarious. “Journalism Plus” – Ha!
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Go team mathbabe!
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Congratulations to you both, Cathy and Mike!
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Thanks! Where are you these days?
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I’ve been following this story for a little while now, and I too am amazed and pleased that (i) a Fox news journalist took air time to make a factual clarification to a previous piece in which he zinged the president and (ii) this apparently had a lot to do with Mike Thaddeus’s guest post on this blog.
Just one thing — maybe this is the mathematician in me which is a stickler for technicalities, but maybe it isn’t — Cathy describes Doocy’s latter action as an “apology”. In the clip I saw he manifestly did not apologize for anything. The distinction between apologizing for your mistake and allowing as how the facts are indeed as the other party has maintained may be a subtle one, but I have come to notice that certain people seem never literally to apologize — maybe on advice of their attorneys?
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