Fox News twisted an innocuous tweet from the Black Lives Matter Twitter account about supporting Palestinians into a salacious headline about BLM actively allying with Hamas terrorists.
On the night of May 18, Fox News online published an article with the headline “Black Lives Matter says it stands with Hamas terrorists in Israeli conflict.” The piece centered its claim around the BLM Twitter account which had tweeted the day before that the organization “stands in solidarity with Palestinians.” The BLM tweet did not, however, imply any kind of support for Hamas, which is a Palestinian militant group.
Fox News’ original headline which relayed a wholly inaccurate portrayal of the tweet was left up overnight. Fox changed the headline the next day to correctly reflect BLM’s tweet supporting the Palestinians, but by then many of its affiliates had already posted the piece with the original headline. It took even longer for Fox to add an editor's note at the bottom of the piece noting the headline change after Forbes and Reliable Sources reached out to the network.
Fox’s false characterization of BLM’s support prompted some prominent right-wing figures to promote a fake connection between the BLM movement and Hamas fundamentalists.
Here are some examples of right-wing media figures amplifying this fake claim (the screenshots were captured after Fox changed the headline):
- Fox News contributor Joey Jones repeated the lie that “Black Lives Matter now supports Hamas” without any pushback from co-anchors Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer.
- InfoWars Owen Shroyer used the original Fox headline to complain about the left using BLM or “Hamas or Palestinians” as a “political football” to win over “sympathy points.” Shroyer also claimed that radical Democrats “want to fund a terrorist group. … The radical left Democrats are now on the side of history of kill all Jews.”
- Right-wing personality and former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis
