Fox News has scrubbed its website of an article reporting on a suicide that occurred at the same time of President Obama's deficit speech at George Washington University. The article appeared on Fox's "American Election HQ" section with the headline "GWU Suicide Tragically Coincides with Obama Speech." While a GW student did in fact commit suicide on Wednesday, there's no evidence that the tragedy had anything to do with the president's visit. Nevertheless, portions of the article seemed to suggest that the two events were related. Case in point:
GWU officials tell Fox that police were notified about the incident around 2pm, which happens to be at the same time that President Obama was speaking. A source tells Fox that the incident may have occurred earlier, noting that police went knocking on the student’s door at 1:30pm. As of this writing, Fox has not been able to obtain reaction from the White House.
As soon as it was published, the article elicited a flurry of negative feedback. "Just think about this," writes Jon Bershad at Mediaite. "If the sources are right and this kid (emphasis on the 'kid') was a junior, that means he was probably 20 or 21 years old. He might not have even been able to drink legally and now he’s gone forever. And FoxNews.com is connecting it to a speech on the deficit? What on earth were they thinking?"
Other protests came from Reddit, Gawker, The Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, which nabbed a screenshot of the article. As of around 4:30 p.m. today, the article, previously located here, was removed with no correction or comment from Fox News. Update: a Fox News spokesperson has contacted Politico with the following explanation: “We were contacted by the university and decided it would be best to take down the story, although nothing was factually inaccurate.”
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