Fox News Laments That Trump Gets "Some Fake News” From His Staffers. The “Fake News” Came From A Former Fox Analyst.

Written by Media Matters Staff

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On May 15, Fox News’ Jon Scott interviewed Politico’s Shane Goldmacher about President Donald Trump receiving incorrect and false information from staffers who were seeking “to give [themselves] an edge on policy decisions.” Scott seemed to lament that “the president [was] getting some fake news every once in awhile, apparently, from his own staffers.” He failed to mention not only that one of the staffers at the center of the Politico article was a Fox News national security analyst before working for Trump, but also that the “fake news” helped promote a climate change myth that was previously pushed by Fox News.

On May 15, Politico reported that then-deputy national security adviser and former Fox News contributor K.T. McFarland gave Trump two printouts of Time magazine covers: “one, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming.” The 1970s cover McFarland gave Trump was actually “part of an internet hoax” which helped propogate one of Fox News' favorite climate change myths; that "global cooling" was scientific consensus in the 1970s. Scott made no mention of the fact that the “fake news” came from a former Fox analyst and was intended to feed into junk science that Fox News has pushed in the past. From the May 15 edition of Fox News’ Happening Now:

SHANE GOLDMACHER: We reported a story today at Politico about the people who are handing Trump stories -- sometimes they’re true, sometimes they’re false -- and having an impact to give themselves an edge in the internal staff jockeying wars, to give an edge on policy decisions. He’s driven very much by information he receives, and so for all of these staff there’s a great interest in using the press -- again Donald Trump is a huge consumer of the media. He wakes up in the morning and he is watching Fox & Friends. People are using that to get to reach him and they’r using the media to convince him to do things. 

JON SCOTT (CO-HOST): All right, interesting stuff. The president getting some fake news every once in a while, apparently, from his own staffers.