Oakland On TV – For some reason, Fox Sports elected to use a faked tweet that was said to belong to the Mayor Of Oakland, and showed a replica of her Twitter account, all to have an Oakland Raiders Fan call Libby Schaaf an idiot. What it read was this:
The Raiders are so embarrassed of their fans they’re thinking of changing their mascot to a pirate covering both eyes.
The insulting event was done during the Fox NFL Pregame Show for NFL Thursday Night Football. A roving reporter named “Saul” went to Ricky’s Sports Bar in San Leandro to interview Raiders fans reactions to tweets.
One of them was from “Bill Belichick”, which is obviously funny because everyone knows the New England Patriots Head Coach doesn’t tweet. Moreover, the only account that seems to be from him has one tweet from 2011. That’s it.
But the other tweet was not funny, and it was the one that Fox News presented as being from Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.
Unlike Coach Belichick, Mayor Schaaf and her staff are frequent users of her Twitter account, so there’s a track record of common tweets issued.
I conducted a search of her past tweets and guess what? There was no tweet from Mayor Schaaf’s Twitter account that fit that description – not even close. Then, I checked the record for deleted tweets, and could find nothing.
Then, I wondered if Mayor Schaaf was the focus of some post where a person found and saved the tweet before it was deleted. There was nothing.
Finally, I texted Libby and asked her about it. She texted back this: “We did not tweet it. I checked with everyone who has any access to my account. Either Fox doctored up a fake image or someone created a fake account.”
There’s nothing from Twitter referring to the tweet, which is a good thing. But that doesn’t lessen the wrongheadedness of the action. Considering how much Oakland Raiders Fans have already blasted her regarding the Las Vegas issue, the last thing she needs is a fake news story that she insulted Raiders Fans.
Fox Sports should just come out and apologize to Libby.
Stay tuned.