Fox News is not known for issuing apologies in response to false reporting, so when it happens, it stands out. The Daily Beast noted over the weekend:
Fox News conceded on Saturday it published a false story last month that claimed a Gold Star family had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to ship their relative home from Afghanistan without help from the U.S. government. In reality, the family paid nothing. “The now unpublished story has been addressed internally and we sincerely apologize to the Gee family,” a spokesperson said in a statement to CNN, referring to fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee’s family.
For those who haven’t heard about the story, Military.com first reported last week on a controversy that unfolded slowly over the course of the last month or so.
It started on July 25, when Fox News ran an online report on Marine Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, who was killed in Afghanistan, and whose family allegedly had to shoulder “a heavy financial burden,” paying $60,000 to have her body returned from the Middle East after she was killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in 2021. The network’s report apparently relied on claims from Rep. Cory Mills, a freshman Republican congressman from Florida.
The story wasn’t true: The fallen Marine’s family did not have to cover the cost of transporting Gee’s remains.
Nevertheless, the claim made the rounds in GOP circles, thanks to Fox’s report. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, for example, promoted the story — despite his own highly problematic record on matters related to the military — and the Alabaman hasn’t yet deleted his online claims.
Fox initially amended its report, before ultimately removing it from the network’s website altogether, though that process proved to be rather difficult.
In fact, among the most striking elements of this story is the pressure the Marine Corps placed on Fox. From the original Military.com report:
A service spokesman notified the news network that it was pushing an incorrect story and accused it of using the grief of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee’s family to draw in readers, the email exchanges, released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request, show. Fox News eventually deleted the story with no correction.
“This headline correction is still misleading and your story is still false,” Maj. James Stenger, the lead spokesperson for the Marine Corps, wrote to Fox News in an email after the network initially edited its false report.
“Using the grief of a family member of a fallen Marine to score cheap clickbait points is disgusting,” Stenger added.
On Saturday, The Washington Post published a report of its own on the story, and soon after, Fox apologized to the Gee family and said the matter has been “addressed internally.”
As for the congressman who the network relied on, the Post’s article added, “Two days after his original comments to Fox, Mills walked back his claims in a statement in which he seemed to blame the Pentagon and the Gee family for being ‘in their time of grief, confused’ about the costs associated with the transportation of Sgt. Gee’s remains. He said the Defense Department ‘was able to provide clarification’ about the matter.”
