Even by Fox News standards, this is incredible. And note, this happens all the time in conservative media. But last Saturday, Fox News reported a satirical news story on National Report as real news. (See the video below.) What’s going on is that conservatives really do believe their own rhetoric. They think that Obama is the anti-Christ. How else do you explain believing a headline like this, Obama Uses Own Money To Open Muslim Museum Amid Government Shutdown? And even if you, as a reader, believed it, how does a reporter just believe it without checking it in the least?

As I mention all the time (conservatives especially get confused), I am not a reporter. Yet whenever I read anything interesting enough to write about, the first thing I do is search Google to see how other people are reporting on it. In this case, apparently some Fox News producer saw the article and didn’t think twice. It was too delicious. And note the way it was reported by Anna Kooiman, “President Obama has offered to pay out of his own pocket for the Museum of Muslim Culture … yet it’s the Republican National Committee who’s paying for [the veterans’ memorial].” That’s fair and balanced, God damn it!

If the Fox News producers had looked on the internet, they probably would have found a 3 October article from Free Republic, tellingly titled, (Satire) Obama Uses Own Money To Open Muslim Museum Amid Government Shutdown. In fact, on the morning of that Fox News broadcast, the top Google search for that headline yielded, MORE FAKE NEWS: Obama Uses Own Money to Open Muslim Museum at About.com’s Urban Legends section.

Or they could have simply looked at the bottom of any page on National Report. They all say:

What’s especially sad is that Fox News wasn’t alone. Most of the articles as of the day of the Fox News report were conservative websites proclaiming the outrage that Obama was using his own money to keep the museum open. Is it any wonder that conservatives hate Obama so much when they get “news” of this quality?