“Fox & Friends” co-host Abby Huntsman apologized on-air Friday after sharing an inaccurate report regarding food stamp fraud.
Earlier this week, the Fox News personality reported that food-stamp fraud is at an all-time high and that an estimated $70 million of taxpayer money was wasted on food-stamp fraud in 2016.
“That was actually incorrect,” Huntsman said. “The latest information from 2009 to 2011 shows the fraud at 1.3 percent, which is approximately $853 million for each of those three years, and nationally food-stamp trafficking is on the decline. So sorry about that mistake.”
The Agriculture Department asked Fox News to correct the story, according to the Washington Post.
“We are not quite sure where this came from,” a USDA spokesperson told Post reporter Erik Wemple. “We saw that there was as story on Breitbart. We have not issued a report on this recently. There is no new rate that we’ve published. So we’re not quite sure why they’re so interested in stirring this up.”
Wemple ripped the Fox News morning show over the situation: “Now here comes the mind-blowing part: Take that 1.3 percent trafficking rate from 2009 to 2011 and apply it to the 2016 SNAP budget of about $70 billion. It comes out to about $910 million, or more than 10 times the rate that Fox News claimed on its show. So even as it reported that food-stamp fraud had hit an all-time high, Fox News was actually reporting a preposterously low number for food-stamp fraud. Only a program as idiotic as ‘Fox & Friends’ is capable of such feats.”
Huntsman was recently named the new weekend co-host of “Fox & Friends” but she has been filling in during the week because many regular Fox News hosts are on vacation.