NEW YORK — Fox News’ morning show “Fox & Friends” should apologize for its “malicious and inaccurate segment” about intelligence leaks and the Islamic State that aired Saturday, The New York Times said on Sunday.
New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said that she requested an “on-air apology and tweet.” The paper, she wrote, took issue with a Fox host on the segment saying that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “was able to sneak away under the cover of darkness after a New York Times story” in 2015 and a host’s comment that the U.S. government “would have had al-Baghdadi based on the intelligence that we had except someone leaked information to the failing New York Times.”
The segment referred to comments by a top military official noted in a Friday Fox story , which was updated online Sunday with a Times statement. The Fox story said the official, Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, was “close” to Baghdadi after a 2015 raid but the “lead went dead” after it “was leaked in a prominent national newspaper.” The Fox story said Thomas “appeared to be referring to a New York Times report in June 2015 that detailed how American intelligence agencies had ‘extracted valuable information.’”
“Fox & Friends” will “provide an updated story to viewers tomorrow morning based on the FoxNews.com report,” the company said in a statement emailed by Fox spokeswoman Caley Cronin Sunday.
The Times also wrote a fact-check pushing back against both Fox’s story, noting that the Pentagon “raised no objections” with the paper before the 2015 article was published, and against a Saturday morning tweet by President Donald Trump, who said the “failing” New York Times “foiled” a government attempt to kill Baghdadi.