Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron repeated a false claim pushed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during a policy speech in Aston, PA, intended to outline the candidate’s newly-proposed reforms to child care and maternity leave. Trump attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for producing no such policy proposals -- a lie which Cameron then repeated on air.
During Trump’s September 13 speech, in which he attempted to flesh out the details of his convoluted reform agenda for child care and maternity leave, Trump falsely claimed that Clinton “has no child care plan.”
Journalists immediately slammed Trump’s claim. Political reporters Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, and Dan Merica of CNN called the statement “patently untrue” and “patently false.” And both noted that Clinton’s comprehensive child care reform agenda, which is far more detailed and expansive than Trump’s, has been online since June 2015.
Despite Trump’s false claim, Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron repeated the lie during a speech recap with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. Cameron claimed that Trump’s speech was aimed at the “moderate voters” he needs to win swing states like Pennsylvania. He then added that Trump “has laid out his child care policies before Hillary Clinton has done anything in serious detail”:
CARL CAMERON: He’s both trying to get ahead of Hillary Clinton while she’s taken ill, but he’s also checking off boxes one of which Hillary Clinton has claimed to be a leader on. He has laid out his child care policies before Hillary Clinton has done anything in serious detail. As of earlier this morning, there wasn’t the types of policy statements on the Hillary Clinton web page that will soon be on the Trump web page. So, he’s going to places that Republicans don’t often go: he’s talking about policies that Republicans don’t often talk about, in order to expand his electorate, expand his support.
As of the end of his speech, Trump’s campaign website does contain a link to his child care policy fact sheet as well as a transcript of tonight’s speech. By comparison, the Clinton campaign published specific proposals to expand early childhood education and child care opportunities to American families on June 15, 2015 (one day before Trump announced his candidacy). The campaign expanded on those proposals with a renewed K-12 education reform agenda on March 10, and proposed an expansion of paid family and medical leave on May 23.
According to an August 29 review by the Associated Press (AP), Clinton’s campaign website contains pages filled with policy proposals on 38 different “issues,” totaling more than 100,000 words -- Trump’s site at the time covered just 7 issues in “just over 9,000 words.” AP reported on September 13 that “by any measure, Clinton has released far more specific plans on far more topics than her GOP rival.”
Perhaps Cameron, who claimed to have checked Clinton’s website “earlier this morning,” just got confused.