By Stephen Battaglio

Los Angeles Times

The Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” is known to be a favorite of President Donald Trump, who often repeats on Twitter information or opinions he gleans from its hosts.

So a major gaffe in an on-screen graphic about the president’s southern border policy announcement at the start of Sunday’s edition of the program got plenty of social media attention.

“Trump Cuts U.S. Aid to 3 Mexican Countries” came up on the lower third of the screen as the three weekend hosts Ed Henry, Jedediah Bila and Pete Hegseth discussed the president’s call to cut U.S. assistance to the Central American nations El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Hegseth accurately named the countries in his description of Trump’s decision to punish them unless they stem the flow of citizens fleeing north to the U.S. border. The president has also said he plans to shut the southern border with Mexico, a threat he has repeatedly made in his rhetoric over illegal immigration.

Henry corrected the graphics error later in the program.

“Now we want to clarify and correct something that happened earlier in the show,” Henry said. “We had an inaccurate graphic onscreen while talking about this very story. We just want to be clear; the funding is being cut off to the three Central American countries. We apologize for the error — it never should’ve happened.”

But by that time, the erroneous line circulated widely on social media and became fodder for liberal critics to attack the channel, whose commentators are often ardent supporters of Trump and his policies.