Fox News and Food Stamp Fraud: The Plot Thickens

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A few days ago I wrote about an odd Fox News report which said that SNAP (food stamp) fraud was at an “all-time high” of $70 million. The odd part of this was not that Fox was lying about SNAP fraud being at an all-time high. What do you expect from Fox? The odd thing was that actual SNAP fraud clocks in at nearly a billion dollars. Why did Fox lowball it? I couldn’t figure out where Fox got its number, and as near as I could tell the Department of Agriculture hadn’t published anything about it more recently than 2011 anyway.

Today, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple does some shoe-leather reporting and makes a few phone calls:

The Agriculture Department is asking Fox News to correct a report from Tuesday morning’s edition of “Fox & Friends” alleging new heights for food-stamp fraud in the United States….“We are not quite sure where this came from,” a USDA spokesperson tells the Erik Wemple Blog. “We saw that there was a story on Breitbart. We have not issued a report on this recently. There is no new rate that we’ve published. So we’re not quite sure why they’re so interested in stirring this up.”

….A Fox News spokesperson indicates that this matter will be addressed on tomorrow’s program.

OK then. It sounds like someone at Fox just made this up, though I’m sure they’ll put a more positive spin on it than that. I’m also sure they’ll be eager to correct the fact that SNAP fraud is actually far higher than they suggested. But given all this, why did the Post’s Philip Bump include the following graphic in his story about this on Wednesday?

It’s fine to write about Fox’s misinformation, but why was it credited to the Department of Agriculture? That’s how Fox credited it, to be sure, but that credit shouldn’t have been passed along without verifying it independently.

One final note: this story demonstrates the value of being numerate. The reason I first noticed it was because the $70 million figure was so obviously absurd. SNAP is a $70 billion program, and it’s nuts to think that it could have a fraud rate that low. Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta probably had a higher fraud rate than that. Anybody with even the smallest working knowledge of SNAP, normal fraud rates, and basic arithmetic should have heard alarm bells going off immediately.

But no one did. Nearly all of the response to the Fox report was either (a) mockery of their suggestion that SNAP should be ended, or (b) mockery of their belief that 0.1 percent was a high rate of fraud. Nobody really seemed to notice that it couldn’t possibly be correct. More numeracy, please.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate