“[Fox news anchor] Bill O’Reilly took [leading Democrat senator] Joe Biden’s appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos and deliberately misrepresented what Biden said. Biden was calling for an independent commission to look at Guantanamo and other US detention camps. When pressed by Stephanopoulos, Biden said that although he personally thought the US should close Guantanamo, he said that he had introduced legislation to get a bipartisan commission to make the recommendations.

“Two days later O’Reilly cuts it together to make it sound like Biden had simply said ‘Close Guantanamo’, leaving out any mention of legislation and independent commissions. Then O’Reilly himself said ‘I believe there should be an independent commission.’ He not only misrepresented what Biden actually said, he then claimed for himself the senator’s idea. I mentioned this to Howard Kurtz, who writes about the media for the Washington Post. He replied, ‘Well, people expect that of Fox’. No one in the mainstream press holds them to any standards at all.”

— Al Franken in the Guardian

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