'Fox & Friends' suggests employment numbers were 'fabricated'

Several Fox News co-hosts on Wednesday continued to suggest that there may be a conspiracy to increase President Barack Obama's chances at re-election by manufacturing better-than-expected employment numbers.

"What does the good economic news -- if you believe these numbers -- mean for President Obama's fortunes?" asked co-host Brian Kilmeade. "It means a lot. It means he's up around 50 percent approval."

"Which to most pundits is kind of the break-even way of looking at it," co-host Gretchen Carlson agreed. "Once you get to 50 percent, you're in pretty good shape when you're talking about re-election."

In the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, Obama's approval rating reached 50 percent for the first time since the May 2011 killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

"The overall feeling that you get from this poll is that in the last month, I believe, that President Obama has gone up six points in approval as to how he's handling the economy," Carlson explained. "And I guess, guys, that kind of makes sense because some of the numbers that we have been reporting: unemployment has gone down, more jobs have been created."

"Now, you can argue about how those numbers -- some people say -- are fabricated," she added.

Last week, co-hosts on the same morning show implied the Obama administration was "cooking the books" when it came to the improving employment numbers.

There is no evidence, however, that the Department of Labor has been fabricating employment figures.

The department gathers unemployment data with a monthly poll called the Current Population Survey (CPS). The sample is representative of the entire nation, comprised of 110,000 individuals, or 60,000 participating households split by geographic region. The bureau says their methodologies eliminate the potential for a wide margin of error to significantly distort the overall unemployment outlook.

Watch this video from Fox News' Fox & Friends, uploaded Feb. 15, 2012.

-- With early reporting by Andrew Jones.

(H/T: Media Matters)