Rushing to set today at 2:25 p.m. ET, Fox Business Network anchor Liz Claman (3-4 p.m.’s The Claman Countdown) saw a headline on Reuters: “Euro Extends Losses as EU Announces Retaliatory Tariffs on the U.S.”
“I immediately said, ‘That’s our lead,’” she told The Hollywood Reporter at 4:30 p.m. There was just one problem … Thomson Reuters was not quite right. What the EU actually said was that they’re thinking about it; Claman and her producers uncovered the error at exactly 2:59 p.m. The joys of live television!
Well, sometimes it is a joy.
“We are happiest when we tear up the show five minutes before the top of the hour. However, we’ve been tearing up the show in middle of the broadcast,” Claman said. “Oh, my God. We’ve been moving things around like a chess board on steroids.”
These are tough times. Like, literally today — just ask CNBC.
The NBCUniversal-owned cable news channel (soon to be spun off into “SpinCo”) was among the outlets that erroneously framed comments from National Economic Council chief Kevin Hassett on Fox News. Hassett was asked on Fox & Friends if President Trump was in favor of a 90-day delay on his tariff proposal, and dodged the question.
Some users on X, however, framed his response as an affirmative to the question, sending the market spiking upward, and leading to the erroneous information that was shared by CNBC and Reuters, among other places.
“As we were chasing the news of the market moves in real-time, we aired unconfirmed information in a banner,” a CNBC spokesperson told THR. “Our reporters quickly made a correction on air.”
THR requested an interview with a CNBC anchor or executive for this story, but did not receive a response to our inquiries.
Mistakes happen. But when mistakes happen in Claman’s line of work, they can have very serious consequences.
“We’re in an era, honestly, where everybody’s cutting and pasting off, not just illegitimate sources but legitimate sources. If I get something wrong (on air), it’s not [the source’s] fault — it’s my fault,” Claman said. “People trade on what they see on my show — I’m not going to take that lightly. It’s people’s money.”
“I am, with my team, just virulently opposed to running with something until we double confirm it — full stop,” Claman said. “We all make mistakes, but you cannot run something that’s going to gyrate the markets unless you are triple-sure of it.”
Fox Business Network and CNBC are just trying their best to keep up with the fallout from the relentless news cycle regularly populating their sister cable networks Fox News Channel and MSNBC, respectively.
The past five trading days have been “insane,” Claman said. “We’ve been moving guests, canceling guests, adding guests — in the middle of the night, I’m waking up and texting my producer, my executive producer and my booker. We have a three-way chat, and all three of us are up at every hour of the night, and we’re like, ‘What about him?’ ‘What about this guy?’ ‘Let’s get this CEO.’ ‘Hold off.’ ‘Cancel him.’ ‘This one’s more important when it comes to what’s happening right now.’”
“It’s a moving target,” she said.
As far as the Trump administration, Claman and her producers haven’t really reached out — they haven’t had to.
“They’re coming to us,” Claman said. “They want a cohesive message out there. It’s just not always working out that way.”
A lot of this doesn’t seem to be working out.
Alex Weprin contributed to this report.