Last week a segment on Fox News saw “terrorism expert” Steven Emerson claim that Birmingham, UK was a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims, stating “non-Muslims simply do not go there”, whilst also regurgitating a baseless accusation that London saw people being thrown into prison by authorities for falling to abide by the rules of Muslim authoritarians.
Of course, none of that information was correct, as I had previously made clear in a previous post. Not that you needed proof, but I actually live in Birmingham, and though it’s a permanently cold and grey city of lacklustre chain restaurants, it’s certainly not the post-apocalyptic wasteland overflowing with religious extremism that Emerson attempted to convey to its US audience.
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The whole debacle inevitably spawned a hashtag in the form of #FoxNewsFacts, which promptly began trending worldwide. Sensing a PR headache, Emerson apologised for the incident, claiming that he had trusted an unreliable source. However, Fox News had still yet to take any responsibility for what had happened outside of Jeanine Pirro, the news host discussing the topic with Emerson during the segment in which he made his comments, saying that “a guest made a serious factual error that we wrongly let stand unchallenged and uncorrected.”
Now the news station has gone full-throttle with their apology, with the broadcaster apologising on-air on Saturday.
Watch the apology below:
While the apology is certainly a nice gesture, it certainly doesn’t feel sincere from a station that began one of its recent segments with Pirro stating: “We NEED to KILL them,” before going on to let burst a volcano of bigoted vitriol, even going so far as to say that a “Christian genocide” was on its way.
