Fox's One Step Forward, One Step Back Stimulus Reporting

Today on Fox News' America's News Headquarters, Fox contributor Gretchen Hamel suggested that, by all accounts, the Obama administration's 2009 economic stimulus package “didn't work.” Shockingly, Fox News host Jamie Colby stepped up in defense of Obama's stimulus bill contending “in fairness, the first stimulus did create 2.4... million jobs.”

Why was this so surprising that Colby reported a figure with which economists agree? Because her comments come in direct contrast to the Fox News hosts and contributors who have over and over suggested that the stimulus was completely useless and waste of taxpayer dollars - including on the network that very morning.

But Fox couldn't maintain factual stimulus reporting for very long. She immediately added that the stimulus came “at a cost of $278,000 for each American at least so far.” As we've pointed out, that statistic is derived from simply dividing the amount of money spent by the number of jobs created, a methodology that has been called “highly misleading” and, as economist Paul Krugman puts it, “bogus” math.

Jamie Colby can now join the ranks of the several other misguided conservative media figures whose ambiguous math has misled the public.