The above clip is from Saturday’s Fox & Friends. At around the 1:55 mark, at the end of a segment on the closure of the World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall, you’ll hear co-host Anna Kooiman offer this conservative-outrage-inducing gem: “It really doesn’t seem fair, especially — and we’re going to talk a little bit later in the show too about some things that are continuing to be funded, and President Obama has offered to pay for the Museum of Muslim Culture out of his own pocket.”
As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, Obama did no such thing. In fact, Kooiman appears to have received her information—um, sorry—“information”—from a second-tier satirical news website, NationalReport.net, which “reported” Obama’s offer last week. The website’s spoof was a version of the increasingly common Internet news-parody con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story to be true, so much so that they don’t bother to investigate for fear of debunking. (We’ve seen this before, most recently with the Daily Currant adding Drudge Report- and Washington Post-shaped notches to its belt.)
On Sunday, Kooiman took to Twitter to address her mistake with an incredibly vague correction, one that not only failed to clear things up but that also shifted the blame on to whoever does her research:
***Follow @JoshVoorhees and the rest of the @slatest team on Twitter.***
Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the government shutdown
