Fox News inflates Obama bank fee by factor of 100

Fox News seems to have trouble with numbers, at least when they have to do with global warming or President Barack Obama.

Today, Fox & Friends falsely claimed that Obama proposed a 15 percent tax on banks in an effort to recoup taxpayer funds shelled out to prop up consumer lending giants Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG.

Trouble is, the actual Obama-backed fee would be assessed at .15 percent -- or 15 basis points -- for covered liabilities. It also wouldn't kick in until bank assets exceeded $50 billion.

The story was first noted by Media Matters for America.

Watch:

This isn't the only time the network has gotten numbers wrong in a way that casts President Obama in an unfavorable light.

Last month, as the network broadcast a speech by President Barack Obama in which the president announced that the US will spend $200 billion less on bank bailouts than previously estimated, the chyron at the bottom of the Fox News screen announced that the president's bailout savings would amount to ... $2 billion.

The same month, Fox News showed a poll on screen that asserted that a vast majority of Americans -- 94 percent -- believe that climate scientists have falsified research into global warming (see picture below). The only problem is, according to Fox's poll graphic, the total number of participants in the poll adds up to 120 percent.

Fox producer Lauren Petterson, executive producer of Fox & Friends, said in an interview that the graphic wasn't erroneous.

“We were just talking about three interesting pieces of information from Rasmussen,” Petterson said. “We didn’t put on the screen that it added up to 100 percent.”