Spin is not enough for Fox News: DEBATEGATE!

Talking Points Memo:

You're not going to believe Fox News did this. Yeah you will.


Is Fox News literally making stuff up out of whole cloth about John Kerry?

I don't expect much from this Republican operation. But this does seem to break new ground.

If you go to the front page of the Fox News site, there's a link right there up front to "Trail Tales: What's that Face".

Link through and you find this ...

Rallying supporters in Tampa Friday, Kerry played up his performance in Thursday night's debate, in which many observers agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president.

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Kerry said Friday.

With the foreign-policy debate in the history books, Kerry hopes to keep the pressure on and the sense of traction going.

Aides say he will step up attacks on the president in the next few days, and pivot somewhat to the domestic agenda, with a focus on women and abortion rights.

"It's about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures," Kerry said.

Kerry still trails in actual horse-race polls, but aides say his performance was strong enough to rally his base and further appeal to voters ready for a change.

"I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy," the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.

A "metrosexual" is defined as an urbane male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.

Did Kerry really say that stuff? Stuff that sounds like classic winger parody? I looked around on google and no other reporters seem to have gotten those choice quotes from Senator Kerry. A source on the Kerry campaign told me Kerry certainly didn't say anything remotely like that.

So what's the story from Fox? Are these quotes real? Made up? Unidentified parody? Straight-up fabrications?
-- Josh Marshall

And then...

Caught red-handed?

This morning on the Fox News website, Fox was running a post-debate story about Kerry with several apparently fabricated quotes meant to disparage the Democratic candidate.


Now Fox has pulled the article from the front page without explanation. And on the article itself the passages I quoted in the post below have all been removed -- again, without explanation.

[ed. note: I saved a copy of the offending article in its original form. Normally, I'd upload it to the site in .pdf format. But I'm away from my office and without my .pdf making software. I have a copy of it saved in Microsoft's .mht format. So I'll work on getting a copy online.]

So what's the deal here? Where did the fabricated piece come from? Who made up the quotes? How long did it run? Why did it get taken down? What happened?
-- Josh Marshall

Josh is all over this. He rocks. Check this out:

Follow-up to the previous two posts ...

I just placed a call to Fox News in Washington, DC to see if they had any explanation for the fabricated Kerry story they were running this morning on their website.

We're waiting to hear back. We'll update when he hear their explanation.

Howie, are you gonna be following up on this?
-- Josh Marshall

Fox News must pay for this! Bloggers of the Blogosphere unite!