FOX & Friends promotes Creationist theme park in sponsored segment disguised as news
Ark Encounter bought airtime to sell tickets—but you’d never know it from watching
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In one of the most on-brand segments you'll ever see on FOX & Friends, correspondent Ainsley Earhardt effectively taped a five-minute infomercial for Ark Encounter on Tuesday morning’s show. She visited the boat with her daughter and their friends and asked no serious questions. (#Journalism.)
Along the way, she posed a rhetorical question to her kids, “Can you imagine if God came to you and said, ‘I am going to have a flood and everyone’s going to die except for you because you’re so faithful, so I need you to build an ark and it’s gonna be that big?’” (This, I’m told, is what devout Christians refer to as a happy story.)
Throughout the segment, Answers in Genesis spokesperson Bryan Osborne walked the women through the “boat” while promoting things like a zipline and zoo.
Afterwards, Earhardt told her co-hosts she wanted to return by herself soon so she could really take in the “valuable literature and information.”
“And history!” her co-host Lawrence Jones remarked.
Earhardt responded: “Absolutely!”
When the segment aired, Earhardt posted on her personal Facebook page, “We loved learning about Noah, the animals on the Ark, and of course some history of the Bible.”
Osborne shared that post with his own thoughts: “Thankful for the opportunity to show Ainsley Earhardt around the Ark Encounter. We had a great time as they filmed a segment about her visit for Fox and Friends that aired today.”
It made it sound like Ark Encounter made the national news for being so damn cool. Creationist Ken Ham even implied as much yesterday, saying the clip of the segment on FOX had received “over 5 million” views:
What no one on the show, and no one associated with Ark Encounter, mentioned out loud was that Ark Encounter paid for that segment to be shown. In fact, in tiny font at the very beginning of the segment, there was a chyron that read, “This segment is made possible by our sponsor: Ark Encounter.”
If you didn’t know to look for it, you might have missed it.
The same thing happened when FOX shared the segment online in a post urging viewers to “Plan your trip today!” It’s only at the very top of the post near the timestamp where you see “Paid Partnership.”
The issue isn’t that one side or the other did something wrong, per se: Businesses pay for product placement all the time. But when the hosts and sponsors aren’t saying that out loud, it’s arguably deceptive for the majority of viewers who don’t understand that. FOX and the Ark Encounter people know that. Indeed, when FOX aired a sponsored segment about the Catholic prayer app Hallow last December, one of the hosts said on air, “Thank you again to Hallow for this partnership.” Why didn’t they do something like that here?
Osborne didn’t mention it in a subsequent post, either, leading one commenter to say the segment was “Excellent PR for the Ark!”
Well sure. You can buy a lot of good press for the right price, especially when you have $100 million to build a ship that can’t float which also serves as a museum that spreads lies to gullible Christians.
As of this writing, parent company Answers in Genesis has not shared the segment online. Whenever they do, will they mention that they paid for it?
By the way, they’ve done this before. In 2019, a similar segment aired with a different morning host. Ark Encounter and Answers in Genesis promoted that one online, too, never mentioning the paid sponsorship. In a now-deleted post on their website, Ken Ham urged people to watch the clip as if it was their big-ass boat, and not their cash, that led to the coverage:
Answers in Genesis writer and speaker Bodie Hodge was recently interview by Todd Piro from FOX & Friends (on the FOX News channel) down at the Ark Encounter. The resulting 3-minute video on the life-size Ark attraction was phenomenal. Bodie not only explained this world-class attraction but clearly gave its biblical and evangelistic message. How often do you get to hear the gospel on national television?
Answers in Genesis also sponsored a segment on Fox & Friends in 2022 to help promote host Steve Doocy’s new cookbook. But you’d only know that from their logo at the bottom of the screen.
I suppose it makes sense that Ark Encounter is spending big bucks to promote itself on national television given that their attendance numbers have been bleak. Spring and summer should be their most popular times, but their reported ticket sales—hell yeah, we still keep track of them—are significantly down compared to this time last year.
Which is to say: Several years after it opened, Ark Encounter is struggling to get more people to visit. It’s so bad that they now have to pay a conservative media outlet to do a segment about their boring boat. They can’t earn that kind of publicity on their own... unless they’re being mentioned as part of some controversy.
(Portions of this article were published earlier because Ark Encounter and FOX keep using the same playbook.)
Creationism is willful ignorance on stilts. It is the attempt to make myth from the infancy of civilization triumph over science and objective evidence. The people who wrote the book of Genesis did not know where the sun went at night, and knew absolutely nothing about how the earth or the universe works, let alone how old they are. It disgusts me that people turn their back on reason, and cling to a mythology without a shred of evidence to support it. And people wonder why the world is the mess it is.
Hey, FOX...
If you're a news outlet, where were the questions about the water damage to Ham's boat and Ham's lawsuit concerning said damage? Looks like that boat/office building/gift shop isn't the only thing that's shoddy.