October 27, 2014 12:52 PM UTC

Maddow Rips Megyn Kelly Over Colorado Ballot Fiction

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• by: Colorado Pols

We took note last week of FOX News evening anchor Megyn Kelly's Tuesday night opening segment, in which Kelly breathessly declared that a "new law" in Colorado has "opened the door to potential voter fraud." Specifically, Kelly claimed, Colorado voters now have the ability to "print ballots on their home computer." This statement struck us as very odd, mostly because we knew right away it was false: other than overseas and military absentee voters who had the ability to do this before Colorado's 2013 election modernization law, nobody can print up a ballot from their home computer.

What's even more surprising to us–not apparently to regular FOX News watchdogs, but we're surprised–is that days later, nobody at FOX News has corrected this blatantly false claim by one of that network's highest-rated news anchors. Because Colorado residents either already know or can easily find out from their county clerk that the story is false, the opportunity for harmful effects on our elections is limited. But if you're a FOX News viewer in another state, listening to that network's almost-daily warnings of imminent election fraud across the nation, this story is going to rightly freak you out: especially when it goes uncorrected.

As Mediaite reported this weekend, the pressure on FOX News to do something about this bogus report is getting louder:

First, 9News anchor Kyle Clark drew attention to Kelly’s remarks and said, “We normally reserve our truth test for political ads, but that claim is misleading.” He explained that the only voters allowed to print out and turn in ballots that way are military and overseas voters. No other Coloradans will be allowed to vote that way.

And then, Friday night, [MSNBS host Rachel] Maddow took a turn going after Kelly, bringing the issues with Kelly’s reporting into the national spotlight. Maddow mocked how seriously Kelly was reporting on this revelation “that they made up.” She explained that other states have similar laws about at-home ballots for service members, but “Fox has now decided that in the state of Colorado, that’s terrifying, even if it doesn’t terrify them anywhere else in the country.”

Call us Pollyannish, but how in the hell can a mainstream news outlet–yes, that includes FOX News–report something so blatantly false, and not correct it all these days later? It's one thing to get facts wrong in a news story. This happens for all kinds of reasons, and a lot of the time it's not the fault of the journalist. Even when it is, a correction is the bare minimum a news outlet can do to ensure that their historical record is accurate. Corrections are still frustrating, since they generally are never seen by as many people who saw the original error, but it's something.

What does it say when the nation's highest-rated "news" network allows blatant lies to go totally uncorrected?

Whatever's going on here, it's as far from "journalism" as you can get.