Fox News Blasts Obama On Household Income, Fails To Mention Incomes Are Going Up

Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade cherry-picked new economic data to attack President Obama over the difference in median household income between now and the year 2000, but they failed to mention that median household income is still going up since it crashed after the Great Recession.

Doocy and Kilmeade blasted Obama on the economy over new median household income data on the June 10 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, but they failed to mention that recent incomes have risen year to year. Seizing on pre-recession data, Kilmeade noted that median household income is down from 2000, when the annual household median income was $57,342 in 2016 dollars. Although Fox & Friends pointed out that this is $79 more than 2016’s median household income of $57,263, the co-hosts did not note that the 2016 figure is still an increase of $2,409 from last year, continuing the post-recession upward trajectory.

Doocy also criticized the president for not getting gross domestic product growth up to 3 percent during his tenure, falsely claiming, “President Obama has been historic … because no U.S. president has ever not had 3 percent growth in a single year.” Doocy’s bizarre claim is wrong: Republican President Herbert Hoover not only never hit 3 percent growth, but he failed to hit zero percent growth, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

The bureau has consistent annual data from 1930 to the present. Because of the Great Depression, the economy contracted at a rate of 8.5 percent in 1930, 6.4 percent in 1931, a staggering 12.9 percent in 1932, and 1.3 percent in 1933. The contraction in 1933 may have been even greater, had Franklin Delano Roosevelt not replaced Hoover in the White House in March of that year, and chosen to initiate the substantial government stimulus projects known as the New Deal. Hoover is also not the only example that disproves Doocy’s claim -- reliable GDP estimates prior to 1930 are difficult to find, but available data show four consecutive presidents overseeing economic growth of less than 2 percent from 1871 to 1885.

Fox & Friends has pushed conservative misinformation on the economy before, sticking to a right-wing script reported on in an April 28 blog post by Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman. Waldman explained how Republicans mislead the American public about the health of the economy by ignoring positive economic trends. The focus of Waldman’s comparison was the “objective reality” of progress and areas for improvement specified by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the “laughable fantasy” of “an absolute [economic] nightmare” outlined by Republican front-runner Donald Trump, but it could have just as easily been any of the personalities at Fox News. The June 10 Fox & Friends segment that misled on median household income is just another example of right-wing media sticking to the script.