Fox News mistakes Patti LaBelle for Aretha Franklin.

Contemptor/YouTube Phil_Lewis_/Twitter Remix by Samantha Grasso

Internet berates Fox News for mistaking Patti LaBelle for Aretha Franklin

Fox News sure tried to squirm its way out of this one.

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Samantha Grasso

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Posted on Aug 17, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 8:34 am CDT

If you’re going to accidentally mistake two Black music icons for one another, the least you could do is come up with a good excuse that doesn’t show your ignorance and can’t be verified.

But it’s no surprise that Fox News couldn’t even do that.

On Thursday, Fox News was attempting to celebrate the life of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, when the station royally screwed up and used an image of Patti LaBelle instead of Franklin’s.

The graphic, used for several seconds during Fox News’ broadcast, depicted Franklin in the foreground. But in the background, behind Franklin’s name and occupation, was a semi-transparent image of what Fox News thought was Franklin performing for President Barack Obama. Alas, the woman performing in the photo was LaBelle, reasserting the idea that Fox News cannot even tell two iconic Black women apart.

Immediately, Twitter caught on to the mistake, and people had questions.

https://twitter.com/therealrahdigga/status/1030272198978756609

https://twitter.com/BrennaSimonSays/status/1030237989694332930

Some tried to make a joke out of the entire ordeal, replacing Franklin’s image with other women who look absolutely nothing like her.

https://twitter.com/timdonnelly/status/1030197462697472000

Even the Onion threw its hat into the ring.

In a statement, Fox News’s VP of media desk Jessica Santostefano explained that the station was actually trying to use a photo of both LaBelle and Franklin performing together, but that Franklin was accidentally “obscured in that process.”

“We sincerely apologize to Aretha Franklin’s family and friends. Our intention was to honor the icon using a secondary image of her performing with Patti LaBelle in the full screen graphic, but the image of Ms. Franklin was obscured in that process, which we deeply regret,” Santostefano’s full statement read.

However, the excuse doesn’t check out in the slightest. Regardless of the reason why Fox News wouldn’t be able to show the women performing together, the fact that they would want to do so at all would just show their ignorance toward the feud between the two, which LaBelle finally squashed after Franklin’s passing.

But more importantly, Fox News wouldn’t have been able to show such an image of the women together if they had even wanted to, because that image does not exist.

https://twitter.com/passantino/status/1030210468697108480

According to the Daily Beast, the original Associated Press image of LaBelle shows Franklin nowhere in the frame. Furthermore, Franklin never came on stage during that performance. The Daily Beast reported that the only connection the women had in that photo was the fact that Franklin had separately performed at the same Obama White House event, and because of that, Franklin’s name also appears in the caption of the photo.

So, could it be some ignorant producer searched Franklin’s name while looking for stock art, and thought they landed on a winner when LaBelle’s image surfaced as a search result? Did this person, in all their years of living, somehow manage to never see a photo of Franklin? Or do all elder Black women look the same to them? We can probably guess which.

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*First Published: Aug 17, 2018, 9:44 am CDT

Samantha Grasso

Samantha Grasso is a former IRL staff writer for the Daily Dot with a reporting emphasis on immigration. Her work has appeared on AJ+, Vox, Splinter, Los Angeles Magazine, and Austin Monthly.

Samantha Grasso