Fox News on-air correspondent Mike Tobin and anchor Shepard Smith seemingly broke the news of a controversial shooting by a Baltimore cop on Monday afternoon, but after conflicting accounts, which say a gun went off during an arrest rather than a pursuit, followed their original reporting, the network backtracked.
Smith went on the air after the official Baltimore police Twitter account stated that nobody had been shot and apologized to viewers.
"Sounds like what happened is we screwed up... Mike Tobin thought he saw somebody get shot. And there was a gun and a patient on a stretcher and there is a woman who said she saw the cop gun him down and there's going to be violence and all the rest of that.," Smith said, according to Mediaite. "And what we have is nothing. And the truth is, according to police, there is no gunshot victim.
"And a bunch of people who are trained at this sort of thing, saw it, and it wasn't real. And now something has been created there that is wrong, and unnecessary. We were wrong. Our people on scene were wrong.
"Theirs was an error that was honest and straightforward and our duty as journalists is not to make mistakes and when we make mistakes we are duty-bound to correct them immediately and as clearly as possible... And on behalf of Mike Tobin and the rest of our crew there and he rest of us at Fox News, I am very sorry for the error and glad we were able to correct it quickly."
Originally, Tobin reported, on-air to Smith, that a young black man was running from a police officer on North Avenue heading west when the cop fired a shot. The reporter was sitting in a car on the street and said he witnessed the shooting.
Tobin said the man "did not appear to be dead," but the cameras caught medics giving him oxygen while on a stretcher. The Fox News reporter said he did not hear the cop say anything before firing the shot, but that he was in a car on the street with the windows up, so it is possible he did not hear a warning.
Watch Smith's full apology below.
