You just can't make this stuff up.
Back in August, local Washington, DC news anchor Doug McKelway became a conservative cause celebre after he was suspended from DC's ABC affiliate, WJLA. Conservatives cited this as an example of liberal media bias, claiming that McKelway was forced off the air for reporting the “facts” about how much money BP had donated to Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
According to the station, McKelway was suspended (and later fired) from WJLA not for his report on BP, but because he got into a “shouting match” with his boss over it.
And McKelway's comments about BP's donations to Obama weren't the “facts” at all.
McKelway claimed that the “strategy” of “far left environmental groups” rallying against members of Congress who have “dirty oil money on their hands” is a “risky” one, “because the one man who has more campaign contributions from BP than anybody else in history is now sitting in the Oval Office -- President Barack Obama -- who accepted $77,051 in campaign contributions from BP.”
But Obama's presidential campaign did not receive donations from the BP corporation. While Obama's Senate campaign did receive a total of $1,000 from BP's PAC in 2004, the donation was less than what 21 other Senate candidates received from the BP PAC that year. The figure that McKelway uses in his report is the amount of money Obama received from employees of the company, who could have chosen to donate for any number of reasons, not simply because they thought it would benefit the corporation. That amount, by the way, accounted for only .01% of Obama's total fundraising.
In other words, McKelway is best known for a falsehood.
Wouldn't you know it? McKelway has just been hired for a new job -- at Fox News' DC bureau.
I guess it's possible that Fox News is just unaware of McKelway's falsehood; after all, Fox personalities made the same claim over and over again.
Then again, maybe bringing McKelway on board is just another example of Fox News Washington Bureau Chief Bill Sammon's efforts to “slant news.”