FOX News had a major graphic mishap on Sunday morning during a segment on Fox & Friends Weekend. The show was commenting on a State Department announcement over the weekend regarding aid to Central American countries.
On Saturday, March 30, the State Department announced the United States would no longer provide federal aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Unfortunately for FOX News, whoever was in charge of the graphics appears to struggle with common sense or geography. Rather than correctly saying “Trump Cuts U.S. Aid To 3 Central American Countries,” the graphic described El Salvador, Guatemala, an Honduras “3 Mexican Countries.”
Twitter quickly caught on.
Some people were upset and immediately jumped on their soapbox to cry racism, while others poked fun at the chyron gaffe and found humor in the error.
One Twitter user wrote: “Come on, we have to get the basics right @FoxNews. You need a fact-checker to tell u that Guatemala, Honduras & ElSalvador are NOT ‘3 Mexican Countries?'”
Since their mistake went viral for all of the wrong reasons, a correction was issued later in the show.
“Now we want to clarify and correct something that happened earlier in the show,” Ed Henry, who was filling in as a co-host, explained on-air later in the show.
“We had an inaccurate graphic onscreen while taking about this very story. We just want to be clear, the funding is being cut off to the three Central American countries. We apologize for the error, it never should’ve happened.”
Despite the apology, Twitter had a field day with the error.
Hey, mistakes happen, and we are thankful because it allows the internet to provide us some moments of laughter. At least this time FOX News didn’t mistake pay tribute to Aretha Franklin with an image of Patti LaBelle. That sure would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it?