There was a report yesterday from a Reuters reporter, David Cay Johnston, that Fox News got billions of dollars in refunds and didn’t pay income taxes for the past couple of years. Well, the reporter admitted that he screwed up Finance 101, and that Fox actually paid those billions in taxes.

“This is a big screw-up on my part,” he told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep earlier today.

According to Johnston, “News Corp. reported numbers as positive numbers for cash paid for taxes for three years and then [in 2007] switched to reporting them as negative numbers — that is, as numbers in parentheses. … And I didn’t catch that those were negative numbers.”

The company did disclose the accounting change it had made. Johnston said he does not recall if he read the note in its financial reports, and says that the way it was written would not have made him realize what News Corp. had done.

He didn’t read the financials correctly, and didn’t see that all those numbers in parens were actually losses or taxes paid, not money refunded by the IRS.

Instead of getting $4.8 billion in refunds, that’s the amount News Corp paid in taxes on $10.4 billion in pre-tax profits.

Johnson had been with the NYT, and this was actually his first written piece for Reuters since joining the company. Ouch.