Carl Cameron
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Carl Cameron is a television personality for Fox News in the United States, and has served as political correspondent following presidential candidates George W. Bush in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. He served as chief political correspondent during the 2004 United States presidential election. In 2005 Cameron became chief White House Correspondent. In June 2006, he returned to his post as chief political correspondent to cover the 2006 midterm elections.
Cameron has been criticized as being a partisan Republican in his reporting, often interjecting subjective labels on Democrats in order to attack them. In one segment, for example, Cameron attacked three separate Democrats in a time period of only fifteen seconds, deeming them variously, "fairly typical liberal partisan", "Angry liberal," and "extremist"[1].
Working with the local Fox affiliate in Maine, Cameron reported that George W. Bush was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence in the 1970s on the eve of the 2000 Presidential Election (see October surprise.) According to Salon.com, Cameron merely confirmed the story with the Bush campaign after all the relevant facts had been discovered by reporter Erin Fehlau.[2] According to OpinionJournal.com, "A couple of minutes [after breaking the story], Mr. Cameron reported a blast fax with the documentation of Bush's DUI arrest was received in newsrooms all over the country. Mr. Cameron calls the blast fax 'a mystery' because he had nothing to do with it."[3]
Additionally during the campaign he attacked Kerry openly as a correspondent by noting that, "Kerry quoted Langston Hughes, who often attacked religion and God and praised communism", negeglecting to mention these facts in a similar report he filed discussing George W. Bush's quotation of Hughes. [4]
[edit] Claims of Journalistic Fraud
Media watchdog groups claim, with supporting documentation, that on a number of occasions Carl Cameron has fabricated statements by Democratic politicians, and that this was done to boost their Republican opponents. One example cited by Media Matters for America was a claim that John Kerry labeled George W. Bush a "warmonger" who intended to create "perpetual war" around the world; mediamatters averred that no such instance of that criticism ever occurred. [5] In another instance, Cameron wrote a story posted on the Fox News website which included fabricated quotes from Kerry; the senator purportedly called himself a "metrosexual" and Bush a "cowboy" and spoke effeminately about a manicure. Official Fox News spokesman Paul Schur later said it was intended to be an internal joke not for publication, and the network apologized for the piece, but only on its website, and only through a tag on the article in which these quotes appeared. [6]
