Updated: 3:06 p.m. ET.
President Obama ran his 2008 campaign on the themes of “hope” and “change.” But just how much hope and change has Obama delivered in his first term?
That was the question on everyone’s mind at Fox and Friends Wednesday morning. “So let’s take a look back,” host Gretchen Carlson said, before rolling the following video.
Watch:
Look familiar? The ominous music, the spliced-together sound bites, the bulging national debt in animated form, the unemployment rate ticking up — it has all the markings of a Republican campaign ad against the president, but produced by a “fair and balanced” news network.
“A lot has happened in the last, coming up on four years,” host Steve Doocy said after the video. Fox Associate Producer Chris White apparently put the video together, according to the hosts. “He remembered everything everybody has said over the past four years,” Doocy said, commending the extensive research it required.
An official Fox News video embed on a post at the right-wing blog Townhall.com has been removed, though the network didn’t return a request for confirmation. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air questions whether it’s appropriate for Fox to put together the video, even if he agrees with its message.
“It makes a pretty powerful argument against another four years of Barack Obama, but that shouldn’t be the job of news-reporting organizations, even when we like the message,” he writes.
Fox News did not return TPM’s requests for comment.
Late update: The video is working at the Fox and Friends website.
Later update: A Fox News executive tells Yahoo News that the video “was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network.”
David Taintor
David Taintor is TPM’s News Editor. He contributes to TPM’s Livewire coverage, among other areas. David is from Chanhassen, Minnesota, where, yes, it gets very cold. Reach him at taintor [at] talkingpointsmemo.com
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