The Military Times reports:
The Marine Corps worked behind the scenes last month in an attempt to convince Fox News to retract its false story claiming a Gold Star family was forced to pay $60,000 to ship the remains of a Marine killed in Afghanistan, according to emails obtained by Military.com.
A service spokesman notified the news network that it was pushing an incorrect story and accused it of using the grief of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee’s family to draw in readers, the email exchanges, released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request, show.
Fox News eventually deleted the story with no correction, and it never reached out to the Gee family with an apology as the Marine Corps requested, the family said. The Fox News story came from Republican Rep. Cory Mills, a freshman congressman from Florida, who claimed Gee’s next of kin were strapped with the $60,000 charge.
The Washington Post reports:
The story’s reporter, Michael Lee, quoted Mills calling the family’s supposed expenditures an “egregious injustice.” Neither Pentagon officials nor Gee’s family were quoted in the original story. Marine Corps officials say the family did not face any financial burdens to have Gee’s body shipped to Arlington National Cemetery. They disputed the story in a series of emails to Fox executives shortly after the story was published.
“The allegations originally published turned out to be false, which I suspect Mr. Lee knew in the first place, and was the reason he did not seek comment from the Marine Corps,” wrote Marine Corps spokesman Maj. James Stenger in an email to the Fox executives. Two days after his original comments to Fox, Mills walked back his claims in a statement in which he seemed to blame the Pentagon and the Gee family for being “in their time of grief, confused.”
Rep. Cory Mills first appeared on JMG in May 2022 when he threatened with attack journalists with the same tear gas that was used against Black Lives Matter protesters. Mills’ company makes that tear gas as well as well as hand grenades, inert versions of which he handed out to House reps earlier this year.
1. @FoxNews reports family of dead Marine had to pay $60,000 to ship her body back from Afghanistan. 2. @USMC disputes story. 3. Fox deletes story without comment, correction or apology to family, according to @Militarydotcom. https://t.co/BKVITU7YFt
— Paul Farhi (@farhip) August 23, 2023
Fox Corporation. @FCC
“The Marines went to the highest levels of Fox to challenge a story that falsely claimed a fallen Marine’s family had to cover the cost of transporting her remains…Fox has not apologized or corrected the erroneous report.” https://t.co/JgrZIz3bP0
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 26, 2023