CRAZY LIKE A FOX: Helping to usher in the new era of New York Times-hating, in which any and all mistakes or minor distortions will be looked as on the level of Jayson Blair's deception, Fox News Channel ran a bit during this morning's "Weekend Live With Tony Snow" in which they took Maureen Dowd to task for a column in which she twisted President Bush's words. In the column MoDo claimed Dubya had said that al-Qaeda terrorists "aren't a problem anymore"; what Bush was clearly referring to were the substantial amount of al-Qaeda terrorists who are either captured or dead. Andrew Sullivan was the first to point this out; the story was later picked up by Spinsanity, which gave due credit to Sullivan.
Both FNC and Andrew made what was at best an error and at worst a distortion look like a deception on the level of Blair's years of journalistic fraud. But what's strange is that the Fox segment gave no credit to Sullivan at all for originally pointing it out, and only mentioned Spinsanity right at the end (followed by a comment from Snow that the story "demonstrates the power of the Blogosphere.") Funny that in covering a story about distorting news- and also chastising the Times for the case of reporter Rick Bragg and his refusal to grant credit to a freelancer- Fox News somehow fails to even give credit to the journalist who first broke the story on which they're reporting.