http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/04/17/foxs-carlson-continues-to-push-misleading-repor/198930
and now for today's wing nut,
Fox News' Gretchen Carlson continued to push a misleading report on IRS communication with the Department of Justice while failing to acknowledge that a previous "bombshell" claim she had made about the report had been corrected.
On the April 16 edition of Fox News' The Real Story, Carlson hyped a Townhall.com report by Fox contributor Katie Pavlich that incorrectly claimed IRS official Lois Lerner "contacted the Department of Justice" to ask about possible criminal investigation of tax-exempt groups. Echoing the report, Carlson asserted that "bombshell emails" show "Lerner contacted her bosses at the IRS and the Department of Justice in May 2013 asking about whether tax-exempt groups could be criminally prosecuted for lying about political activity":
Carlson failed to note that at the time of her broadcast, Pavlich's report had been updated and corrected to note that it was the Department of Justice, not Lerner, who initiated contact:
Editors note/correction: A previous version of this post stated and implied Lois Lerner contacted the DOJ about criminal prosecution when the emails state she in fact got a phone call from DOJ about the issue. While she was clearly in contact with DOJ about criminal prosecution for tax exempt groups, DOJ initiated the contact in this specific instance. Emails also show Lerner and Flax responded to both recommendations by Senator Whitehouse and DOJ to look into criminal prosecution. The headline to this post has also been updated.
Carlson again discussed the emails during the April 17 edition of The Real Story, noting that she "first reported them here on the show yesterday," but she failed to correct her false claim from the day before that Lerner "contacted" the Department of Justice. Carlson also failed to mention that the emails show Lerner's concern that criminal prosecutions of tax-exempt groups that misrepresent their political activity is "not realistic under current law":
okay this is intentional misleading and obviously sanctioned by Fox higher ups, if they were concerned with reporting facts they would have shut her down and not allowed her to continued the farce of their home made scandal, the trouble with that is generally when you expose a scandal you bring credible facts as proof, hard to do that when only record of their story is on their teleprompter.
