Fox News anchors sometimes remind viewers that: We report. You decide.
The company took an especially broad outlook on what kind of information merited a decision on Monday, when it appeared to question the reality of the Apollo missions and the moon landing.
“You be the judge: Skeptics say picture debunks moon landing,” the network tweeted. The accompanying story cited an anonymous YouTube conspiracy theorist’s video that claimed to show discrepancies in a photo from the Apollo 17 mission. The story does not have a byline. A spokeswoman for the network did not respond to a request for comment about whether it considers the moon landing up for debate.
By the afternoon, the story had also made it on the front page of Google News. Newsweek and The Daily Mail also amplified the conspiracy theory.
The story may seem like a giant leap for Fox in terms of what sources it deems newsworthy. The network—whose reporters have questioned the existence of climate change and advanced sketchily sourced conspiracy theories—has given airtime to many viewpoints that challenge the established evidence in the past. But even so, the fact that NASA went to the moon is a particularly strange story to pick up. The Apollo landing sites are not only a product of American scientific and technological leadership; they’re also an easily confirmable fact. Probes from Japan, China, and India have all seen the landing sites, as have later NASA missions. A preponderance of evidence from the period also testifies to the reality of the landing.