Stuart Varney offers no apology for falsely linking OWS to an embarrassing Craigslist ad.

Two days, two Voice articles, and four emails later, FOX Business Network host Stuart Varney has finally acknowledged that a Craigslist ad recruiting paid demonstrators for a "protest" in Zuccotti Park had nothing to do with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

However, he offers no apology for the embarrassment his linking the ad to OWS has caused the movement. Rather, he just hassles the guy who actually posted the ad for tricking him into thinking the occupiers were behind the ad.

If you're not familiar with Varney's show falsely linking the ad to Occupy Wall Street, click here (basically what happened is someone on Varney's staff stumbled upon a Craigslist ad recruiting paid protesters to go to Zuccotti Park earlier this week to "hang out" during a protest. No where in the ad does it mention anything about Occupy Wall Street, but because OWS rhetoric (the whole "99 percent" thing, Zuccotti Park, etc.) was used in the ad, Varney's show determined it was the work of the occupiers. Oops -- as we proved Wednesday, OWS had nothing to do with the ad).

See video of Varney finally acknowledging that OWS had nothing to do with the ad below.

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Stuart Varney's successfully made the jump from financial reporter to spreader of false rumors. Good journalism, pal...

Yesterday, Fox News' Stuart Varney claimed he found an ad Occupy Wall Street placed on Craigslist offering $10 an hour for people to pose as protesters and "hang out" in Zuccotti Park for two days of protest. As we revealed yesterday, Varney's claim is bullshit -- Occupy Wall Street had nothing to do with the ad, and it was actually posted by a for-profit price club business.

Varney used the claim in an attempt to humiliate the OWS movement, joking on his TV show yesterday about how funny it is that a group that's so anti-capitalism would offer a cash incentive to "hang out" in a park. Varney's fans used his false claim to suggest that even OWS members know their movement is losing steam.

So Varney's corrected his error, right? Wrong -- we've reached out to Varney and the PR squad at News Corp -- Fox News' parent company -- multiple times since we exposed Varney's false claim asking for an explanation, or an apology, or a correction -- anything. We've heard nothing back -- all while the faux-story is building up steam on Varney's Facebook page.

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Fox News' Stuart Varney claims OWS is recruiting paid protesters via-Craigslist. OK -- where's the proof?

Good news for the Occupy Wall Street folks: you can now be an OWS "bum" and get paid for it -- that's according to Fox News' Stuart Varney, anyway, who claims (based on literally nothing) that OWS is recruiting paid protesters via-Craigslist to "hang out" in Zuccotti Park today and tomorrow (spoiler alert: the group offering cash for protesters isn't OWS -- it's a for-profit price club -- which Varney might have realized had he done a more thorough "investigation" (Google search). More on that below).

On his show, Varney & Co., this morning, Varney claimed he found a Craigslist ad offering $10 an hour for people to "hang out" in Zuccotti Park today and tomorrow morning. He credits the ad to OWS and quipped how funny it is that a group that's so anti-capitalism would offer a cash incentive to "hang out" in a park. The problem, as we see it, is that no where in the ad Varney claims to have found does it mention anything about Occupy Wall Street. And the group that probably posted the ad is a for-profit company -- not anti-capitalists -- that wants to get "10,000,000 users worldwide" so it can "get the power to make the deals!"

Below is the text from the ad Varney baselessly attributes to OWS (all sic):

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Joe Muto claims his apartment was raided.

Fox News "mole" Joe Muto claims (via-Twitter) that his apartment was raided this morning by investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and several of his mole-y gadgets were confiscated.

"I just got search warranted at 6:30am by a very polite crew from the DA's office. Took my iPhone, laptop, some old notebooks," Muto "tweeted" this morning.

As the morning went on, Muto fired off three more tweets about the alleged raid.

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Gawker's "mole" at Fox News, Joe Muto, was outed less than 24 hours after first publishing a few insignificant yarns from inside the cable news network's newsroom -- and now he claims on Twitter to be in the midst of a "media firestorm."

The only interview he's actually given -- which he pimps on Twitter as being an "exclusive" -- was to CNN's Howard Kurtz -- and we hate to break it you, Fox News foes, but he comes across as a bit of a douchebag (see the video embedded above), inspired more by dollar signs (and a possible book deal) than with exposing any right-wing bias many claim the Roger Ailes-run network has.

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The thing about anonymity is that to remain anonymous it helps when people don't know who you are -- a concept that the blogsters over at Gawker apparently have a hard time understanding.

Gawker has a bit of a history when it comes to promising anonymity to people who contribute fantastical, often reckless stories to its site -- only to have the identity of these sources outed shortly after. The latest "anonymous" Gawker blogger who's likely to soon lose his anonymity is a "mole" inside Fox News who's using his job at the network to tell unflattering, but ultimately irrelevant, stories -- and it took Fox less than 24 hours to figure out who he is (according to Fox, anyway).

Fox confirms to the Voice what Mediaite -- which actually asked readers to guess how long it would take for the mole to be outed -- reported earlier: that the mole has been made and the cable news behemoth is "exploring legal options."  

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In a mishap that sent tremors through the media consciousness, the New York Times earlier today sent out an email that was first attributed to spam, possibly a hack, and then acknowledged to be from the Times. It was supposed to go to 300 subscribers; instead it went to 8 million. It was, as they say, an accident. But was it, as FoxNews writes, the New York Times's Anthony Weiner moment? Let us investigate the email. It went like this:

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Yesterday, a 21-year-old man named Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez was charged with attempting to assassinate Barack Obama. There's a lengthy complaint available that includes quite a bit of information, including scary stuff he said about Obama to people who knew him well, referring to the president as 'the anti-Christ," the devil, and indicating he wouldn't stop "until it's done." There's information about what he had in his car, about how he conducted the alleged shooting, and even what he was wearing. There is NO mention of any Occupy movement -- the word "occupy" doesn't even appear in the document. So, why is it in this Fox Nation headline?

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via the "Support Stacey Hessler" Facebook Page

Stacey Hessler is a 38-year-old mother of four from Florida who was so inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement she moved to Zuccotti to join the protestors. Hessler made the trip almost two weeks ago and has been living in the park ever since. The New York Post reports she "ditched her banker husband and four kids," but would the paper turn Hessler into some sort of caricature? Why, they would never do that to the "Flower-power flake," as she is described in the headline that graces the top band of the Post's website when you open the story.

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In case you missed it, President Obama threw a "hip-hop barbecue" yesterday for his birthday, which somehow failed to create jobs. Or so shrieks this headline from Fox Nation, Fox News' aggregation organ. Non-hip-hop artists Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock performed while "Rome burned" (look at the URL). The race-baiting and unethically edited aggregation have been mentioned elsewhere, so we'll raise a somewhat different question: where was Philips Andover's stable of up-and-coming young rappers during the Obama Hip Hop BBQ, such an important event in the genre?

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