TPMMuckraker

Fox & Friends: We Should Have Clarified That Our Report On Obama Apologizing To Japan Was False

Jillian Rayfield October 14, 2011, 2:45 PM

Which is harder to believe — that Fox News got something wrong or that they apologized for it?

Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy made a statement on the show on Friday to clarify that the show’s earlier report that President Obama had planned to apologize to Japan for Hiroshima was, in fact, not true.

“We’d like to clarify a story we reported on yesterday on this program,” Doocy said. “The story was about a possible apology from President Obama to the country of Japan for the United States dropping bombs on that country during World War II.

“Well,” he continued, “we want to make sure this is very clear. There was never a plan for President Obama to apologize to Japan. We should have been clearer about this, and we’re sorry for any confusion.”

Here’s the video, via Mediaite:

In a segment Thursday morning, Fox & Friends had reported that a Wikileaks cable revealed that prior to a 2009 visit, President Obama was thinking about apologizing to Japan for dropping atomic bombs during World War II. The cable, from US Ambassador to Japan John Roos, supposedly expressed to the Obama Administration that Japanese officials didn’t think it was such a good idea, which stopped the plan in its tracks.

In the F&F segment — with the chyron “Another Presidential Apology” — Brian Kilmeade called this a “personally disturbing” development, and Doocy said it was “jaw-dropping.” At the end of the segment, Gretchen Carlson notes that the White House said the story is not true.

From ABC News:

A senior White House official asserts to ABC News that there was never any plan for the president to apologize for Hiroshima. The cable does not state that the idea was from the U.S. Rather, Roos writes that [Vice Foreign Minister] Yabunaka thought that following President Obama’s call earlier that year for a world free of nuclear weapons, anti-nuclear groups would speculate as to whether he would visit Hiroshima.

From the cable, which you can read in full here: “[Yabunaka] underscored, however, that both governments must temper the public’s expectations on such issues, as the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a ‘non-starter.’”

The apology was issued after Mediaite contacted Fox News about the errors. Fox said it would “address” them in Friday morning’s show.