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Tucker Carlson Walks Back Debunked Story About Nashville COVID Cases But Says, ‘We Don’t Know the Truth’

Monday night, Tucker Carlson addressed — but did not apologize for — his show’s reliance on a now-debunked story from a local affiliate for a Thursday segment.

“We don’t know the truth,” said Carlson of the story from Nashville’s Fox affiliate WZTV, which has been retracted but said last week that the Nashville mayor supposedly concealed the number of coronavirus cases linked to bars and restaurants because they were low.

Earlier Monday, Fox News’ Steve Doocy did “apologize for any confusion” that arose after the wide-reaching cable news channel picked up the local story.

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The original story has been scrubbed from the Fox 17 website, but a cached version shows that the channel reported Thursday “coronavirus cases on lower Broadway may have been so low that the mayor’s office and the Metro Health Department decided to keep it secret.” That report cited “emails between the mayor’s senior advisor and the health department.” A Friday fact-check from the Nashville Tennessean of the Fox station’s reporting revealed that the mayor’s office didn’t conceal statistics “at all” and Fox 17 subsequently retracted the story during a 9 p.m. broadcast Friday.

Thursday was when Carlson covered the initial, inaccurate story on his own 8 p.m. broadcast.

Monday, he told viewers, “We told you last week about a story from a local news station in Nashville — Fox 17 — about a series of emails between the mayor’s office there and the city health department. In those emails, the officials appear to discuss whether to release to the public the very low number of coronavirus cases connected to bars and restaurants. That story understandably attracted a lot of attention. There’s been some drama, though, in Nashville since then. Under pressure from the mayor’s office, Fox 17’s channel has pulled that story off its website. The station is no longer reporting that the mayor’s office covered up the coronavirus numbers. It’s now been reported that some of those numbers were actually put out in August and the public didn’t seem to know about them.”

He went on to say that the mayor’s office is saying the emails were taken “out of context.”

“We don’t know the truth about that because we don’t have all the emails,” he concluded.

Watch above, via Fox News.

Read original story Tucker Carlson Walks Back Debunked Story About Nashville COVID Cases But Says, ‘We Don’t Know the Truth’ At TheWrap