A break from polling for a moment.
Josh Marshall has been posting this afternoon (here, here and here) about a mysterious story about John Kerry that appeared on the Fox News site with some highly implausible quotes, then reappeared sans quotes.
I emailed him with what follows, but he probably hasn’t seen it yet. A colleague in my office remembers reading the same story earlier this morning with different content:
The story that is on the Fox site [that Marshall first referenced here] is not the same one that was posted there this morning. I read it earlier. It was a legitimate story about the facial expressions of the candidates, mostly about Bush.
My colleague assumes Fox was hacked by someone, presumably an outsider.
Our contribution to fact checking. Now back to regular programming..
UPDATE: Nope, not an outsider, but a Fox reporter’s bad joke gone awry. Also, thanks to Allen (see comments).
Fox has a comment up:
“Editor’s Note
“Earlier Friday, FOXNews.com posted an item purporting to contain quotations from Kerry. The item was based on a reporter’s partial script that had been written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast. We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice.”
You should probably stick to writing about polls. Fox news hacked? LOL Fox news is full of hacks. You gave them way too much credit and made yourself look bad.
Assume the worst, Mark. 9/11 changed everything.