Fox News falsely claims unemployment nearly doubled under Obama

• Tweet
• 
• 

• Tweet

The Fox News show Fox & Friends used two separate measurements of unemployment to falsely claim that the unemployment rate had nearly doubled under President Barack Obama.

“When you look at the numbers, the numbers are damning,” co-host Steve Doocy said. “These are not good for the President. Jay Carney can say we are pulling ourselves out of the hole but look at that, 23 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking. When the President took office the unemployment rate — the real unemployment rate — was less than 8 percent. Now, it stands at 14.7 percent.”

But as Media Matters first pointed out, Doocy was comparing the official unemployment rate with an alternate measure of unemployment, which is always higher than the official figure. The official unemployment rate is currently 8.1 percent, only 0.3 percent higher than it was in January 2009.

“Other than Fox News, where are you seeing those statistics?” radio show host Laura Ingraham ironically quipped.

Fox News told Mediaite that the network would issue a correction on Wednesday.

Watch video, courtesy of Media Matters, below: