Under Fire, Doocy Retracts Fabricated Obama Quote

As we reported Sunday, Fox News personality Steve Doocy fabricated a quote from a recent President Obama address in an interview with Mitt Romney, and the Washington Post, among other news outlets, ran with Doocy's fake version.

The story quickly went viral, and by late Sunday, WaPo had corrected its reporting.

On Monday, Stephen Colbert weighed in on the Doocy imbroglio in his own fashion, commending the Dooce for his practice of "journalism plus".

Today, Doocy took to the air on Fox News and issued a correction. 

“Last week President Obama talked about not being born with a silver spoon in his mouth. That was interpreted as a big dig at Mitt Romney,” Doocy said toward the end of Fox & Friends. “When I was interviewing Governor Romney on this show I asked him about it. However, I did some paraphrasing that seemed to misquote the president. So to be clear, the president’s exact quote was, ‘I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.’ And I hope that clears up any confusion.”

Actually, Dooce, that does not clear up all the confusion. You clearly reached for a piece of paper on-air in your interview with Romney in order to read this fabricated quote. Who wrote the material you were reading? What was the source for that version of the quote? Were you reading from internally produced material or from a third-party source? From how high up in the Fox News universe did this fabrication originate?

Same questions for Philip Rucker at WaPo. How did those three words end up in your initial report? The WaPo reporting on the President's speech you cited did not contain the fabricated version of the quote, and you cited no resource for those additional words in your story. Where exactly did you obtain the falsified quote that you ran without attribution to any source?

Inquiring minds want to know.