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Fox News Ordered Staffers To Echo GOP On Health Care

The Huffington Post, Monday, December 13, 2010 12:44 AM

Media Matters has obtained leaked emails that show how a top Washington editor at Fox News directed his journalists not to use the phrase "public option." Instead, Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington managing editor, told staffers to use the phrase "government option." This happens to be the exact phrase that Republican pollster Frank Luntz had advised Republicans to begin using to describe the public option -- on Sean Hannity's show.

Speaking to Hannity in August 2009, Luntz said: "If you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split," but that "if you call it the 'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it." Media Matters obtained an email that Sammon sent the day after Harry Reid introduced the health care bill in the Senate. The bill included a public option. In Sammon's email, sent on Oct. 27, 2009, he reminds journalists not to use the term.

Read the whole story at The Huffington Post »

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2 comments about "Fox News Ordered Staffers To Echo GOP On Health Care".

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Kevin K from Anonymous, December 14, 2010 at 3:31 p.m.
What a shock, FOX News provides GOP "talking points" to its on-air staff. Please...........that's why they should change the name to "FIX NEWS."
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Janis Mccabe from jmod35, December 16, 2010 at 3:43 p.m.

Ditto Kevin. And make it sound even more subversive (as it quite truly is). For the most part it's the set-up Lying News that appeals only to our worst fears. What they present isn't really news. It's propaganda slanted totally to the weathly right's wishes.