This is such a typical BS Mountain story.
Fox News has spent the holiday week screaming about Food Stamp Fraud, because flying spaghetti monster knows they can't dwell on the incoming Republican administration. I'm assuming "somebody who mattered to Fox" pointed out that their story was a bunch of BS. Or maybe it was just such BS that even Fox couldn't just let it slide.
But they got caught, so let's just do a 30-second correction the Friday before New Year's Eve weekend, shall we?
ABBY HUNTSMAN: An update to a story we brought you earlier this week regarding fraud in the food stamp program. We reported that in 2016, $70 million was wasted on food stamp fraud. That was incorrect. The latest information shows the fraud at 1.3% which is approximately $853 million for those three years combined. Nationally food stamp trafficking is on the decline. So sorry about that mistake. Back to you....
(Off screen male host): We forgive you.
Ed Henry also called it an "honest mistake."
Make it about sweet innocent Abby Huntsman and not about a conscious decision on the part of Fox management to push the Food Stamp Fraud again (remember Bret Baier's SIX part series?) because Republicans.
Whoops, turns out the lie was caught by the US Agriculture Department, and was then reported by the Washington Post, and was read by one of the Murdoch boys, no doubt. Wapo's Erik Wemple blog points out that the Agriculture Department cannot figure out how this came to be a Fox News story at all. They have not issued ANY reports about food stamp fraud AT ALL in recent months. USDA told Wemple:
"We are not quite sure where this came from. We saw that there was a story on Breitbart. We have not issued a report on this recently. There is no new rate that we’ve published. So we’re not quite sure why they’re so interested in stirring this up.”
Wemple continues:
The program’s role in helping needy people acquire food has made it a favorite target of Fox News over the years. ...Take that 1.3 percent trafficking rate from 2009 to 2011 and apply it to the 2016 SNAP budget of about $70 billion. It comes out to about $910 million, or more than 10 times the rate that Fox News claimed on its show. So even as it reported that food-stamp fraud had hit an all-time high, Fox News was actually reporting a preposterously low number for food-stamp fraud. Only a program as idiotic as “Fox & Friends” is capable of such feats.
They're not idiotic, Erik. They're liars. And they get their "news" ideas from Breitbart, now a Trump White House outlet.
Fox "News" is not news, and if cable news was about truth rather than money, they would be taken to court for using that "news" word, they would be drummed off the air for their shameful propaganda...and maybe someday their internal emails would be hacked and released and the world would know they lied like this on purpose every single day.
PS. From 2014, Jon Stewart on Fox News and their obsession with shaming food stamp recipients:
