NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes in his forthcoming book Murdoch’s World that Fox News’ public relations staffers used an elaborate series of dummy accounts to fill the comments sections of critical blog posts with pro-Fox arguments.
In a chapter focusing on how Fox utilized its notoriously ruthless public relations department in the mid-to-late 00’s, Folkenflik reports that Fox’s PR staffers would “post pro-Fox rants” in the comments sections of “negative and even neutral” blog posts written about the network. According to Folkenflik, the staffers used various tactics to cover their tracks, including setting up wireless broadband connections that “could not be traced back” to the network.
A former staffer told Folkenflik that they had personally used “one hundred” fake accounts to plant Fox-friendly commentary:
Continue reading: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/10/20/fox-news-reportedly-used-fake-commenter-account/196509
Related story: Dishonest Fox Chart Overstates Comparison Of Welfare To Full-Time Work By 500 Percent
Fox News used a dishonest graphic that inflated a comparison between the number of people receiving federal benefits to those working full-time by 500 percent to misleadingly imply more people receive government benefits than work.
The October 28 edition of Fox & Friends aired a graphic which purported to compare the number of people who received means-tested federal benefits to the number of people with full-time jobs in 2011. However, the chart used a truncated y-axis, and showed the number of people on welfare — 108.6 million — as approximately five times greater than 101.7 million, the number of people with full-time employment.
The Secular Jurist 