FOX PLAYS IDEOLOGICAL TELEPHONE AGAIN

Headline at Fox Nation:




What the linked story (from CNN) actually says:

IRS collects docs from 88 employees in investigation

The Internal Revenue Service has told House GOP investigators they have identified 88 IRS employees who may have documents relevant to the congressional investigation into targeting of conservative groups, according to a congressional source familiar with the investigation....

Republicans are privately preparing to seize on the fact that if nearly 90 IRS employees may have been somehow involved in this targeting, it is evidence that the controversy extends well beyond the mistakes by a few low level employees.

However, with no documents in hand, there is no way to know how many of the employees being asked to preserve documents were truly involved in the activity in question....

Oh.

So instead of nearly 90 IRS employees definitely being involved, we have a maximum of 88 employees who may have relevant documents. Um, that's rather different.

The folks at Fox Nation know that, of course. The inaccurate paraphrase is no accident. That's a standard Fox propaganda technique: getting the facts wrong in a way that seems inadvertent but that nudges a story much further into the right-wing outrage zone (and gullible-centrist outrage zone).