This is from a while ago, but I stumbled across it today, and I didn't see it anywhere, so I'll post it here.
The culture at deceit and pandering in the Murdoch empire has now infected every part of its operations.
Now, apparently, even its coverage of the NFL includes crap they just made up.
In this case, they decided to attack Jay Cutler, quarterback for the Chicago Bears. During the forth quarter of Chicago's season opener against Atlanta, announcer Daryl Johnston brought up Cutler's exit from last year's NFC championship game. For those of you who don't remember, or never cared about it, Cutler left the game with an injury and he endured a great deal of criticism from fellow players for not being tough enough.
The general sentiment was along the lines of "Hey, it's the NFC Championship game, for cryin' out loud. You play through the pain in the NFL."
Fox, apparently, wanted to remind its viewers of the questions surrounding Cutler's toughness, but the truth just wasn't enough.
So what did they do?
They made crap up.
They flashed "headlines" on the screen that read:
Cutler Leaves With Injury
Cutler Lacks Courage
Cutler's No Leader
Johnston then informed viewers: "These are actual headlines from local papers in Chicago."
The problem is that some of the people who write the local papers in Chicago, get this, actually tune in to Bears games from time to time. It set off somebody's BS detector and they started digging.
The Chicago Tribune reported:
The whole production rang false to us. The headlines didn't look real. The language used in them was off. And since we knew that most Chicago media had defended Cutler, we looked into it. We searched throughout Illinois newspapers for those headlines--Tribune, Sun-Times, Daily Herald, every other paper in the state. What did we find?
Nothing.
In fact, we could not find any such headlines in any newspaper in the United States.
So they decided to ask Fox Sports about it.
Their response?
A spokesman for the network said: "The wrong word was used. Our attempt was to capture the overall sentiment nationwide following that game."
Kind of like "The American People are against job-killing tax hikes"?
The culture at that network is ridiculous. They think nothing of creating an alternate reality for their viewers. While we've all grown used to that in their news coverage, I can simply get my news elsewhere. The problem is that I'm a football fan and sometimes Fox is the only place to watch the game. I already hate their effing retarded robot thing, but this is ridiculous.
Perhaps I was naive, but I thought I could at least count on them to cover football semi-honestly.
What's worse? We see that the Fox News sense of accountability also extends to sports coverage. After being confronted, the Network equivocated about taking any action: After first declaring that they were "unsure" if they would issue an on air apology.
Eventually they did capitulate and apologized to Cutler on air.
Apparently they fear Bears fans more than they fear Democrats.
And really, can you blame them?