Fox News sets the record straight on their non-role in the Sherrod firing, again, prompting Politico to correct a story that inaccurately claimed that FoxNews.com ran the story at 5:18 p.m instead of 5:58 p.m. Why does it matter when FoxNews.com posted a news story? Because leftists dug themselves into a hole by smearing Fox News as being responsible for an unfair firing. Desperate to avoid having to correct themselves, the smear campaign has been blaming Fox anyway despite the fact that the channel did not run any footage of Shirley Sherrod until after she was fired by the Obama administration. After that fact became too clear, the new claim was that FoxNews.com was responsible… pathetic.

UPDATE: HotAir.com notes the following:

New meme: Fox News got Sherrod fired because its website published a story about her

Fox Nation had the story at 1:43 p.m. but it didn’t break big until Drudge linked to … a CBS story at around 4:30 p.m., 48 minutes before FoxNews.com reportedly published anything. Two points, though. First, didn’t Sherrod say she was told that one of the reasons she had to resign was because she was “going to be on Glenn Beck tonight” (which she wasn’t)? That suggests that the gears were turning to push her out before Beck hit the airwaves at 5 p.m. ET … which was also 18 minutes before FoxNews.com published anything. You have to read waaay down into the Politico article to be reminded of that. Second, as Johnny Dollar noted in replying to Media Matters, if you look at the comments to the original FoxNews.com article, the first one doesn’t appear until 6:22 p.m., more than an hour after Politico claims the article first went live. Er, how can that be? Wouldn’t there have been 64 minutes of comments in there if Politico’s timeline is correct?