Fox runs made-up War on Christmas story

While WikiLeaks is reinventing journalism for the better, it still has to vie for influence against the dinosaur media's yellow journalism.

'Fox & Friends' has reported that a public school in central Florida has banned red and green from classroom decorations because they happen to be Christmas colors. Big problem with this story? It's a lie. It turns out that the story was made up out of whole cloth by right-wing agitators, and Fox News chose to run with it - knowing it was false.

Faux News did almost the exact same thing in 2005 when Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that a Texas school had banned red and green. This has become pretty much a boilerplate story in the pop-up media.

The FCC used to take it very seriously when stations intentionally distorted the news. Read about the WLBT case sometime. (It was one of the first things we learned about when I took broadcasting in college.) I'd think that Fox lying about the news outright would certainly fall under the category of distortion.

Fox runs phony stories about schools banning decorations with Christmas colors, but it ignores real stories about public schools establishing unconstitutional uniform policies that punish kids for wearing almost any color.

The right-wing media is engaging in a War on the Holidays. To these malcontents, the season is about bringing horror to all.

(Source: http://mediamatters.org/research/201011290017?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+mediamatters/latest+%28Media+Matters+-+Latest+Items%29)