Advertising Age must be feeling pretty stupid right about now...yesterday in a fashion-magazine-ishly titled "What Everyone Is Talking About" column, Claire Atkinson bit hook, line, and sinker on the utterly erroneous tipster-sourced "news" that the Fox Business Channel was about to launch, like, yesterday. ("Close to birth," in Atkinson's colorful words, like Ad Age has more in common with an old Us Weekly Brangelina baby story than with a reputable industry publication.) A Fox News exec responded on FTV Live (subscription):
Surprisingly another reporter got it wrong on the supposed launch of the Fox News Channel. Last year at this time, the Wall Street Journal's Julia Angwin said a deal with Time Warner was "imminent" and the network's launch would take place in the "first half of 2006." Here we are exactly 6 months into 2006, and almost one year to the day the story hit, and there's still no business channel to speak of.
Now Advertising Age has checked in with a breathless story that FNC is about to “birth” the business channel as “tipsters” claim it could launch as “soon as this month.” But top FNC execs tell FTVLive that there is absolutely no truth to the story, which was "reported" without much fact by Claire Atkinson, and there's not a chance in hell a network is launching this month. (Fox has said countless times they won't even launch a business channel without adequate distribution)
So was Atkinson fed erroneous information by the same “insiders” who let the WSJ’s Angwin astray over a year ago? Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti said, “Sources know that Claire is naïve enough to believe just about anything you give her, so it's hardly a surprise that she wrote an inaccurate story after being fed misinformation by 'insiders.' But I would hope her editors would keep a closer eye on her because 'reporting' like this just tarnishes the good name of Ad Age.”
