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| - An online rumor claims the Fox News TV channel aired a graphic about Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, reading, "Tim Walz's Communist Agenda."
The graphic features seven items purportedly supported by Walz. Users shared the image online in the days after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris selected Walz as her 2024 vice-presidential running mate.
The seven listed agenda items included "unsupervised female health decisions, rampant LGBTQIA+ rights, school lunches for unemployed minors, medical care elderly, sick or injured, taxes on corporate profits and couches, free non-Christian college" and "believes in 'climate change' hoax."
To find more postings of the graphic, we performed quick and simple reverse-image searches using both Google Images and TinEye.com.
Our results showed that numerous users posted the supposed Fox News graphic in early August 2024 on the Bluesky social media platform, Facebook, Imgur.com, Reddit and X.
This popular share on X appeared posted in jest. It received over 1.5 million views.
However, this was not a genuine graphic broadcast by Fox News. The graphic appeared to originate on Aug. 7 in a popular post on the r/PoliticalHumor subreddit on Reddit. The post featured a label reading, "It's satire." In other words, the graphic originated as a satirical post.
The inclusion of the line about taxes on couches referenced a viral rumor falsely claiming Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance — former U.S. President Donald Trump's vice-presidential running mate — once wrote about having sex with couch cushions, supposedly in the first printed edition of his 2016 memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis."
Even with the couch joke and other satirical bits, some online users appeared to believe Fox News truly aired the graphic.
For example, one Reddit user posting (archived) on the r/JoeRogan subreddit shared and then later deleted the graphic. Another user on X also posted the graphic, then later followed it up with a reply reading, "Unclear if this is real now, but I'll wait for the community note."
According to a video hosted on the Internet Archive's TV News Archive website, as well as a post on X, the original and unaltered graphic aired on Fox News on Aug. 7 at 5:03 a.m. PDT. The title of the genuine graphic read, "Tim Walz's Economic Scorecard."
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