Not only does Carl Cameron write up joke quotes, he somehow inserts them into the mouths of Fox commentators! That's what Joshua Marshall suggests; we put it to the test.

Mr Joshua Marshall, in his blog Talking Points Memo, is up in arms about those Carl Cameron joke quotes that somehow got temporarily posted on the Fox News website. He lists the quotes that have him upset:

• "It's about the Supreme Court"
• "Women should like me! I do manicures."
• "Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"
• "I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."

Mr Marshall has several questions about FNC’s reaction to this, but the one that interests us is number eight:

8. Why did comments very similar to Cameron's fabrications come up again and again from Fox commentators on debate night?

And over at poynter.org, a letter writer claims:

Last night, I caught a bit of post-debate commentary by a Fox News reporter who said something odd about how John Kerry will appeal to people who like men with well-manicured hands and makeup on their faces...

From what we recalled of the coverage, all of that struck us as suspicious. After all, it’s not like people haven’t made false claims about what has aired on Fox in the past. So we went to the Tivo and pulled up FNC's debate night coverage to see if we could find any commentators making references similar to:

• women like kerry
• manicures
• metrosexual
• bush a cowboy
• the supreme court
• makeup on their faces

Brit Hume asked Susan Estrich about the manicure at 6:22:

BRIT HUME: A couple of things before we get down to more serious matters....the manicure--
SUSAN ESTRICH: The manicure? Help me with the manicure!
BRIT HUME: I’ve had a manicure in my life; it was a rather pleasant experience...

Later, in the roundtable segment, the panel of Fox contributors mentioned it as well:

MICHAEL BARONE: I see nothing wrong with getting a manicure.
FRED BARNES: This is a man who needs to stop windsurfing and stop getting a manicure and desperately needs to go bowling.
MORT KONDRACKE: It’s not what the folks out in the country get, a manicure. Why do they announce this kind of thing?
BRIT HUME: Believe me, they didn’t announce it.

However, the manicure story didn’t start as one of Cameron’s joke quotes (those apparently hadn’t even been written yet!)--it actually broke earlier that day, and was reported not just by Fox but also by others. So it’s not surprising that it would have been mentioned, but such mentions would have nothing to do with as-yet-unwritten comedic quotes.

On to the post-debate coverage. We checked all Fox commentators' statements on the post-debate show, looking for any of the “comments very similar” alleged by Mr Marshall (and for the bizarre statement that the poynter correspondent claimed).

Here are some representative comments on Kerry from the post-debate panel:

FRED BARNES: I’ll have to say John Kerry did better than I expected. I thought he was very good, very articulate...[Bush] was repetitive...
MORT KONDRACKE: The tide began to turn and Kerry stopped being nervous and became quite forceful...
BILL KRISTOL: Kerry was forceful and articulate...If you’re a Kerry supporter you’re heartened now...He looked in command.
CICI CONNOLLY: What we saw from Sen Kerry was a real breadth of knowledge on these issues...it almost seemed as if the President ran out of material 2/3 of the way through the debate...John Kerry filled the television screen more....
BRIT HUME: He [Bush] looked annoyed.

Oddly enough, not one mention of anything remotely like “women like me”, "supreme court", “metrosexual”, “Bush is a cowboy”, "make-up"--in fact, not even one mention of the manicure!

The next hour was taken up with Hannity and Colmes; we checked all of the statements by both Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes and the results were the same: nothing remotely like the statements Mr Marshall described, or those of the poynter letter-writer. The discussion was almost exclusively on foreign policy (as was the debate itself). The final hour of debate coverage was hosted by Greta van Susteren, and once again, not a single reference similar to any of the statements in question.

So who were these Fox commentators who on debate night delivered "comments very similar" to the fabricated quotes--not just once or twice but "again and again"?