You May Have Seen These Fox Graphics Before -- In A GOP Press Release

Written by Matt Gertz

Published

Fox-GOPFox News cribbed research and graphics directly from a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) press release without disclosing their origin in order to attack President Obama's purported “sequester priorities.”

In a Fox & Friends Saturday interview with NRCC chairman Greg Walden, co-host Tucker Carlson claimed that he was “going through a list here” of supposedly wasteful federal spending projects and crucial programs that are impacted by the mandatory spending cuts required by sequestration, but did not explain where that list originated. Every case of both worthwhile and allegedly worthless spending they discussed had previously been highlighted in a February 28 NRCC press release.

Later in the segment, Carlson asked Walden, “wouldn't it make sense for Republicans to come up with a list, push that list over to the White House, and publicize that list of pointless programs like this that ought to be cut?” Walden replied, “Absolutely.”

Throughout this segment and a second segment Fox aired on-screen graphics that mimicked images included in the NRCC release in order to criticized what they termed Obama's “sequestration priorities.” Here are those images, with the Fox versions on the left and NRCC versions on the right:

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Fox News has repeatedly cut and pasted or otherwise parroted GOP materials without disclosing the partisan source of the research. In graphics used for one 2009 segment, Fox News even replicated a typo that had been included in the Republican research document that the network was reproducing without disclosure. After anchor Jon Scott subsequently apologized for the typo. CNN host Howard Kurtz castigated Scott at the time, saying that the Fox anchor should apologize for repeating “partisan propaganda from the GOP” unsourced.

Here are the Fox & Friends Saturday segments, in which Carlson interviewed Walden and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley:

UPDATE: On the March 4 edition of MSNBC's Politics Nation host Al Sharpton and guest Joe Madison discussed the Fox graphics and their NRCC origins.