Is This Fox News Story on Roy Moore’s Accuser Their Most Blatant Act of Dishonesty Yet?

A genuinely new development in the Roy Moore saga occurred today, and stop me if you’ve heard this before: state-run media deliberately framed it as something bigger than it actually is. Fox News has since changed the headline you see below, despite leaving this initial tweet up for a few hours before deleting that as well.

After being called out for running interference for a child molester, Fox News changed the headline to: Roy Moore accuser admits she wrote part of yearbook inscription attributed to Alabama Senate candidate.

The crux of the issue is that Beverly Young Nelson, one of Roy Moore’s alleged victims, told ABC News that she added the date and place next to Roy Moore’s writing in her yearbook. Here is a photo where you can see the font underneath Moore’s handwriting change. The message that Moore wrote is not in doubt, just the date and location next to Moore’s message. This doesn’t meaningfully change the credibility of the allegations, and even though it is a bad look to hide this fairly insignificant fact, it is far from being a “forgery” like Fox News asserted. And you can bet they knew exactly what they were doing.

Fox News doesn’t care about the truth. They exist solely to whip up anger to support right-wing candidates. I know that there are plenty of actual journalists there (like Shep Smith, who basically exists solely to rebut Sean Hannity’s madness), but their good work is overshadowed by the propagandists running the network. Their credibility is forever ruined by their bosses, who simply want a “news” network that exists to push right-wing conspiracies that serve to elect extremists like Roy Moore to public office.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.