Fox & Friends preemptively hammered Biden for a bad jobs report. They were only off by 750k jobs.
Fox & Friends preemptively hammered Biden for a bad jobs report. They were only off by 750k jobs.
Oops.
Fox & Friends preemptively hammered Biden for a bad jobs report. They were only off by 750k jobs.
Fox News openly roots for President Biden to fail under the guise of doing journalism. On Friday, it backfired in delicious fashion.
Fox & Friends opened Friday’s show by preemptively hammering Biden for what was anticipated to be a rough January jobs report.
They only ended up being off by 750,000 jobs, give or take.
During an interview with his son Peter, host Steve Doocy cited one outlier estimate that the report could show up to 300,000 jobs lost in January — the consensus estimate was nowhere near that dire — and asked him, “how is the White House gonna put a happy face on that?”
“If past is precedent, and usually at the White House it is, he’ll come out and he’ll say this is proof that people get to be vaccinated,” Peter replied, prompting his dad to ask, sarcastically, “what vaccine do you get for job loss?”
Everyone then had a chuckle at Biden’s expense. Watch:
But about two hours later, news broke that the US economy actually added 467,000 jobs in January. A stunned Steve Doocy reacted on air by saying, “How did everybody get this so wrong?!"
Not only are the January numbers good, but the figures for November and December were revised up by the government by more than 700,000 jobs, continuing a Biden-era trend of the jobs reports being revised upward. From the New York Times:
The Labor Department on Friday said that job growth at the end of 2021 was significantly stronger than initially reported. The government now says that employers added 647,000 jobs in November, up from the 249,000 reported previously, and 510,000 in December, up from 199,000.
Unsurprisingly, however, it didn’t take long for Fox News to find a way to spin its coverage of the strong jobs report in negative way by contextualizing it with polling showing a majority of people are dissatisfied with the economy.
And as Biden delivered a victory lap speech later Friday, Fox made sure to remind people that he’s still grappling with “MULTIPLE CRISES.”
Biden didn’t ignore supply chain issues and inflation during his speech — “I am going to continue to do everything in my power to work with the Congress to make our capitalist system work better, to provide more competition, and to lower prices for American consumers,” he said — but he did tout his exceptionally strong first-year jobs record.
"This morning's [jobs] report caps off my first year as president, and over that period, our economy created 6.6 million jobs,” he said. “If you can't remember any year when so many people went to work in this country, there's a reason: it never happened."
No malarkey detected.
UPDATE — Fox News leaned even harder into negativity Friday afternoon.
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Steve and Pete Doocy. The Sanford and Son of Fox.
Excellent catch, Aaron, and I'm glad you captured some of the great "highlights" of F&F falling on their faces. *snicker* I love a good self-own, and between TC & Those People, they gave you plenty of fodder! :)