Fox News Channel Finds Itself Outfoxed

I popped up on the Fox News Channel the other day. Maybe you missed it. I was part of a story about Paula Poundstone and the preferential treatment she may or may not have received recently from a Superior Court judge in Santa Monica

My qualifications? Funny I should mention that. I’m co-founder of a year-old Internet Webzine called HollywoodPulse.com, for which a partner and I ruminate weekly about the goings-on in show business from a decidedly unique (read: warped) perspective.

Our secret? We make it up.

We pride ourselves on ingredients that are nearly 100% fact-free. Truth is our sworn enemy, logic our perennial adversary. The mandate: to offend with equality and impunity.

Our “stories” have included such exclusives as the bidding war among record labels to ensure that Mariah Carey never records a CD for them; the admission by “Friends” lead Matthew Perry that he had become hopelessly addicted to rehab clinics; the scoop that Cher’s face had inexplicably fallen off while running an errand; and NBC’s unveiling last December of a “Drunk for the Holidays” campaign in tandem with the network’s newfound acceptance of hard-liquor advertising.

It is what is commonly known in contemporary society as satire. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Yet while the humor presentation is demonstrably dry, it’s the rare human who mistakes it for anything approaching genuine.

This is where Fox News Channel comes in.

My East Coast-based partner on HollywoodPulse.com, Tom Comi, was bemused on Feb. 22 to find a message in our site’s contact e-mailbox from a producer at Fox News Channel, who was wondering if one of our representatives might have time to submit to a taped interview for a planned Poundstone story.

When Comi shared this curious information with me, I assumed that the piece Fox had in mind involved parody of some sort.

I was wrong. “This is Ray with HollywoodPulse.com,” I said to the inquiring e-mailer, who should probably remain nameless.

“So, can you come down to our Los Angeles bureau today to tape an interview about Paula Poundstone’s preferential treatment by the law?” he asked.

“Well,” I replied, “I’m not exactly sure if your premise would be entirely my take. But I could head down maybe on Monday to discuss it.”

This was a Friday. On Monday, I drove to the strip-mall offices of Fox News Channel in West L.A., convinced that someone would greet me at the door to say, “We’re sorry, but there’s been a terrible mistake. You are so far from legit that we’re prepared to offer you hush money if you promise to deny this conversation ever took place. In lieu of that, please get back into your car and drive back into the hole from whence you crawled.”

Instead, I heard, “Hey! Come on in!”

Clearly, the research staff at Fox News hadn’t bothered to actually read the material on our Web site. Not a single sentence. If they had, they would have seen mock stories headlined, “Poundstone: ‘I’m a Drunk Driver, Not a Child Molester!’” and “Poundstone Granted ‘Supervised’ Child Abuse.” Hardly the kind of credible journalism one might associate with expert opinion.

How did this slip through the Fox News Channel cracks? No doubt, it went something like this:

A researcher probably entered the words “Poundstone” and “court” into the Yahoo! search engine. Positioned at No. 17 on the resultant list is a HollywoodPulse.com story from Nov. 17, 2001, headlined, “Paula Poundstone Plays Dumb After Violation.” The utterly fabricated piece found the comedian expressing purported shock and outrage that a recent liquor-drinking, pot-smoking, coke-snorting binge represented a true violation of her probation.

But again, this was apparently ignored by Fox News, as was the lead story spoof on our site that very week detailing how a judge had granted Poundstone new child abuse privileges so long as it was overseen by a court-appointed monitor.

This is admittedly biting, taste-challenged stuff. And that is, of course, all the more reason we should never have been allowed to fly in under the top-rated cable news channel’s radar. Someone probably scanned a headline, scribbled down the Web address--which sounds legitimate enough on its face--and it was off to the races.

How else to explain that Fox News had a full workweek to blow the whistle after I taped my interview with reporter Trace Gallagher on Feb. 25? The story didn’t run on the network’s 4 p.m. edition of “The Fox Report” until March 1. And when it aired, there I was, my frightfully jowly mug weighing in on the subject, with my name and HollywoodPulse.com affiliation gloriously emblazoned on screen.

It would be one thing if I had set out to dupe Fox News and somehow succeeded. The truth is scarier. The network duped itself, through either sheer laziness or cluelessness.

Was it my place to apprise them of the fact that they were about to assign credibility to a spurious source? I thought not. Not when it meant being able to flaunt it in the very first completely truthful story ever to appear on the demented pages of HollywoodPulse.com. Not when it enabled us to flag its appearance with the on-site banner “As Seen on Fox News Channel.”

I mean, these are the guys who proclaim, “We report. You decide.” I simply decided to let them report. The result wasn’t real journalism, merely an incredible simulation.

Ray Richmond is co-founder of HollywoodPulse.com.