You want to know what bad journalism looks like? Read the article “Free Speech Rights Prevented Probe into Hasan Emails, Investigators Say“, currently the headline article on Foxnews.com. A few days ago I lambasted Fox & Friends for jumping to a quick conclusion that political correctness concerns prevented the military from taking preemptive action that could have forestalled the tragedy at Ft. Hood. Well, here is an article that, at least on the surface, seems to prove Fox News correct. But look a little closer and you’ll see things aren’t quite what they seem.

The title of the article and the first paragraph focus on the political correctness charge. It describes the “squabble” between investigators “as charges fly that ‘political correctness’ prevented officials from taking action”.

Who are these charges from? A unanimous “government investigator” told Fox News that he thought that was the case. We don’t know who this investigator is, whether he works for the FBI, the military, or someone else, or whether or not he has any familiarity with the case.

The article then goes on to describe how the investigators who are on the case had emails that tied Hasan to a radical cleric, but the emails were benignly religious and didn’t contain any evidence that would have furthered an investigation. An investigator familiar with that particular investigation told Fox that they definitely hadn’t missed any connections to terrorist groups or violent individuals. Fox then cites another investigator who denies that Hasan’s religion was a factor at all in the investigation into him before the shootings.

Then the article wanders into speculation by some that his easy acquisition of personal firearms led to the tragedy or that his unbalanced mental state might have mattered, before getting back to the witness reports that he praised God before opening fire. The article then cites two different Fox news correspondents who state that of course his religion was the key factor here, that this is further evidence of a liberal media bias, and that of course political correctness concerns stifled the investigation.

OK, so to summarize: Fox gives absurd prominence to the claims of a single “government investigator” who they never claim knows anything more about Hasan than you or I to allege that political correctness concerns hampered a full investigation of Hasan before the shootings. Then they cite a number of investigators who are familiar with the case that contradict that statement. Then they cite their own analysts who never address the contradictions, take the word of the anonymous investigator as fact, and use it to slam the media for biased coverage.

This goes way beyond bad coverage. This is a deliberate obfuscation of the facts in support of a self-created conspiracy theory. Like I said before, it’s not Fox News, it’s Fox Fiction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Disasters and Tragedies, The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.