The Top 10 Fox News FAILs of 2011

Defending the now-infamous spraying of University of California Davis students by a police officer in a November, 2011 protest, Fox News host Megyn Kelly inaccurately described pepper spray as a "food product, essentially."

This led to her getting an insane amount of television, podcast, radio and internet ridicule. She even got her own internet meme, attributing false, but similarly insensitive and ridiculous quotes to her such as:



and



The students, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, were protesting peacefully when the officer walked calmly by the seated group and sprayed their faces. His actions were denounced by lawmakers and even the chancellor, who had called in the cops herself--but not by Fox.

Pepper spray is actually less a "food" than a chemical extract. It contains purified capsaicin, the alkaloid compound that gives peppers their burn. It can cause corneal damage and respiratory failure. Sometimes the capsaicin is manufactured synthetically, even. There's nothing "natural" or "food" like about it.

On the same show, Bill O'Reilly defended police for "not wanting to lay hands" on the students and claimed that the only other option was to physically remove them.

When Sarah Palin spoke to Boston residents as part of her national tour, she was confronted with a question about American patriot Paul Revere. Clearly confused, Ms. Palin blurted out that the hero "warned the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms."

While wisdom may have dictated that the error was best left alone, the former presidential candidate could not let this one lay.

Palin went on to Fox News and declared that yes, in addition to warning the Colonists with those famous words, "The British are Coming! The British are Coming!" Paul Revere had also gone around to the British folk who were already here to warn them that their efforts would be f*tile.

The former Alaska governor failed to disclose which history book the information was gleaned from.

When presidential nominee Ron Paul gave an interview to Bill Hemmer on Fox News after Paul won the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll, he was probably expecting a congratulatory occasion. When the show opened with a crowd booing at the announcement that Paul had won, he and viewers may have scratched their heads.

To rub it in, the host commented that the hisses were "probably not the reaction he was hoping for "

Turns out, the footage was actually from the 2010 straw poll announcement. Paul had also won that year. However, at the 2011 event the crowd cheered riotously for the candidate rather than hectoring him.

This was a "mistake" that once again led to Fox News almost deliberately skewing American information, and therefore opinion, towards their agenda and less towards "facts".

Hemmer later apologized, calling the incident an "honest mistake."



Yep.

Fox news is no stranger to map gaffes. Quite the contrary, botched geography is an annual occurrence (and at this point, even a tradition) for the location-challenged network.

In 2009, Fox placed replaced Egypt with Syria. In 2010, they put Sydney on the wrong side of Australia. And then true to form, in 2011 Fox managed to mistake a nightclub for a nuclear power plant on their map of Japan.

During the Japanese meltdown scare, the network displayed a chart mapping all of the nuclear power plants in the country. However, one was labelled "Shibuyaeggman," which was mysteriously absent from any other official records. Investigations turned up the truth--Shibuyaeggman is a popular night spot. It may get hot during the late hours, but it's probably safe to say that the club is safe from a nuclear explosion.