O'Reilly show, AP mislabel Foley as Democrat

Did the "The O'Reilly Factor" air a correction after mislabeling Republican Mark Foley a Democrat under a photo of the disgraced ex-Congressman? "Once it came to our attention, we removed the incorrect chyron immediately," said David Tabacoff, executive producer of the Fox News Channel show hosted by Bill O'Reilly, who also does a newspaper column distributed by Creators Syndicate. "We didn't run a correction per se." Foley was mislabeled on O'Reilly's Oct. 3 show. When the program was rebroadcast, the Democrat label was scrubbed but not replaced with a Republican one. Soon after the Oct. 3 show aired, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting asked: "[A]ssuming it was an honest mistake... how come when the show was re-aired, the lower third was removed entirely–rather than replaced by one with the correct information? If it was important to identify Foley by party when he was thought to be a Democrat, why isn't it just as important to correctly identify him as a Republican?" Tabacoff said on Oct. 5 that "everyone knows" Foley–who resigned his House seat after revelations that he sent sexually charged messages to teen Congressional pages–is a Republican. So "The O'Reilly Factor," he said, didn't feel it was necessary to run a specific on-air correction on its Oct. 4 show. But Tabacoff emphasized that when Foley was pictured on "The O'Reilly Factor" after Oct. 3, he was correctly identified as a Republican. "It was an honest mistake," Tabacoff said of the Oct. 3 mislabeling. An Associated Press (AP) story on Oct. 4 also erroneously called Foley a Democrat. AP issued a correction about three hours later, according to BradBlog.com.