Fox News Uses 11 Year-Old Photo From Japan to Try to Slam Biden for 'Empty Shelves' in the U.S.

Conservative elected officials and media personalities have for months decried President Joe Biden for pandemic and holiday-induced supply chain issues.

Weeks ahead of the holiday season, hosts on the conservative Fox News network likened Biden to the Grinch who stole Christmas, anticipating widespread delays in holiday gift deliveries.

While supply chain issues haven't simply evaporated, Fox's hysterical forecasts never materialized. Ninety-nine percent of USPS packages were delivered on time in the weeks ahead of the holiday season. Wal-Mart's U.S. CEO publicly thanked Biden for actions taken to offset bottlenecked imports, such as expanding the Port of Los Angeles' hours to 24/7, securing commitments from top importers to expedite shipping container removal, and signing off on 100 day reviews of vulnerabilities in the supply chain.

Nevertheless, Fox News continues to broadcast pictures of empty store shelves, but they've done so deceptively.

Recently, guest host Rachel Campos-Duffy anchored alongside a graphic of "Empty Shelves Joe," that featured Biden—yet again—with a background of empty store shelves.

There's just one problem: the empty shelves in the graphic were from a store in Japan, taken more than a decade ago.

The photo comes from a 2011 NPR story about the mass exodus of Japanese citizens near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which had suffered an explosion.

People weren't surprised to see Fox grasping at straws.

Many used the picture to justify opposition to Fox being labeled a "news" network in the first place.

UPDATE: In a later broadcast, Fox issued a correction for the error:

A quick word before we go during last night's broadcast we aired a graphic that was believed to contain a current image of empty shelves here in the U.S. It was not and we regret the error.”