According to Media Bistro’s TV Newser, Fox News didn’t make “a rather awful series of graphic mistakes…when reporting a story on the gunman that was killed in the city of Toulouse, France,” March 21.
TV Newser explained that social media users and blogs like Sodahead published screenshots of Fox News misspelling Toulouse in on-air graphics. However, the screenshots are Photoshopped, according to TV Newser.
The Guardian noted that the phony screenshot also showed map labeling Toulouse, France as in Romania. Other errors the Guardian highlighted:
- France’s president is named as Claude Gueant (who is really the former chief of staff of the real president Nicolas Sarkozy)
- The gunman is called a “crazy Buddhist madman.” (Which he wasn’t…a Buddhist, at any rate).
“Not even Fox News could get so much wrong in one go,” the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade wrote.
TV Newser showed that the original screenshot came from June 2011 segment in which Fox News did inaccurately air a picture of Tina Fey posing as Sarah Palin instead of a picture of Sarah Palin.
See our story on the Palin-Fey error here.