If you watched Fox News at all this week, which I hope you didn’t, you may be aware of a story they’ve been pushing for days to stoke outrage about upstate New York hotels kicking out “struggling homeless veterans” to make room for undocumented immigrants. Fox News, and Laura Ingraham in particular, can’t resist a literal “the migrants are displacing us” story, and so didn’t bother to even make one phone call to see if this thing they’d heard from an advocacy organization was true.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t! The story was so much of a hoax, in fact, that the veterans advocacy group that concocted it reportedly went so far as to pay unhoused men from a shelter to pose as displaced veterans for cable news. Per the Mid-Hudson News:
The men told Mid-Hudson News on Thursday night that they were part of a group of 15 men that were supposed to pretend they were veterans that had been kicked out of the Crossroads Hotel in the Town of Newburgh last Friday, in advance of the arrival of migrants brought up from New York City.
The saga of the displaced veterans received national attention when Assemblyman Brian Maher stepped in to denounce the hotel’s actions and grabbed headlines along with an appearance on a conservative tv network to raise money for the YIT Foundation, which claims had housed the homeless veterans at the hotel.
So after a week of touting this story as an example of how America values “illegals” more than the men who went to war for us, Ingraham was forced to admit to her viewers Friday night that none of it was true. “A little update on a story we brought you this week about homeless vets being displaced from hotels so illegals can move in,” she said, slipping it in just before a commercial break. “Turns out the group behind the claim made it up. We have no clue why anyone would do such a thing.”
I think Ingraham knows exactly why someone would do such a thing: Because Fox News hosts like her will hungrily pick up the story without doing the least bit of fact checking, and the outrage it drums up will raise a fuck-ton of money for this corrupt foundation purporting to help veterans. And I doubt she would have copped to this lie at all if Fox hadn’t just lost nearly a billion dollars over its stolen election lies.