Fox News
- Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs on Thursday night admitted that he had made a mistake when he reported a poll as showing 55% approval figures for President Trump.
- Trump had seized on the incorrect figures the previous night, hailing them as "great news."
- It seems that Dobbs had confused the 55% of respondents in the poll who said they had an unfavorable view of the president for those who approved of him.
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Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs was forced to issue an on air correction Thursday night after incorrectly reporting that President Trump has approval rates of 55% — a false figure the president seized on and boasted about on Twitter.
"I’d like to repair something I got wrong last night, incorrectly reporting that a Georgetown poll showed the president had an overall approval rating of 55% — the number in fact is 43%," Dobbs said in Thursday night’s edition of his show, Lou Dobbs Tonight.
55% of people in the poll, produced by Georgetown University, said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, and it appears Dobbs confused the number with the 43% who approve of him.
He went on to make light of error, remarking "now to those numbers of reparations that assure you, at least most of these numbers are correct — just kidding, just kidding."
He had correctly reported that the poll showed Trump with 58% approval ratings for his handling of the economy.
Dobbs’ apology followed a public retraction of the false poll claim claim by Fox Business Network reporter Blake Burman, who remarked on behalf of Fox Business that a tweet by The Lou Dobbs Show the previous night reporting the figure had got it wrong.
"That tweet featured a poll that was not entirely accurate, which Fox Business would like to correct," said Burman.
Shortly after Lou Dobbs Tonight tweeted the wrong poll numbers Wednesday, the president had retweeted them, proclaiming them as "Great news!"
The message remains on the president’s Twitter feed on Friday, having amassed 30,000 retweets, and 120,000 likes.
It is not the first time this year the network has been forced to make a humiliating climbdown, with the network apologising in January after broadcasting a graphic on an edition of Fox and Friends falsely saying that 86-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was dead.
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Source: Business Insider – tporter@businessinsider.com (Tom Porter)