FoxNews Changes Their Article

FoxNews has modified their article on the debate to correct their duplication of Vice-President Cheney's Gaffe last night of mentioning "Factcheck.com" instead of "Factcheck.org" -- in the revised article, FoxNews states:

Cheney said that the allegations are false and directed voters to read the truth about Halliburton at FactCheck.com; although he probably meant FactCheck.org a project of the University of Pennsylvania that independently evaluates politicians' claims. Ironically, FactCheck.com forwards visitors to the Web site of left-leaning billionaire and Bush administration critic George Soros."

But in the original article published shortly after the debate, FoxNews had repeated the VP's error and written:

Cheney said the Halliburton allegations are false and directed voters to factcheck.com, a project of the University of Pennsylvania, to read the truth.

I have used a product called Furl to store a copy of the original FoxNews article here and the live copy of the FoxNews article can be found here.

While media can take advantage of the fluidity of the Internet to change their articles without notice or apology, we the media consumers can also be vigilent in observing and recording this funny business.

After reading Fox's summary of the debate and counting the number of times that the piece promotes Cheney's points in the debate, and doesn't mention Edward's points I didn't need to see them change this article to know that they were a mouthpiece for the Bush-Cheney campaign. But seeing the way they chose to make this change, speaks volumes of the editorial integrity of the FoxNews team.

UPDATE:

Boing Boing has an interesting note on this -- that the owners of factcheck.com are a for-profit advertising service based in the Cayman Islands and that they redirected their URL to George Soros "...to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," as they were being deluged with hits within minutes after the end of the debate. Also interesting is the note that factcheck.org posted which says in part "...we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.