America’s dumbest television program, a play in three acts

I think “epistemic closure” is too dignified a term to describe what’s going on here:

Fox News openly roots for President Biden to fail under the guise of doing journalism. On Friday, it backfired in delicious fashion.

Fox & Friends opened Friday’s show by preemptively hammering Biden for what was anticipated to be a rough January jobs report.

They only ended up being off by 750,000 jobs, give or take.

During an interview with his son Peter, host Steve Doocy cited one outlier estimate that the report could show up to 300,000 jobs lost in January — the consensus estimate was nowhere near that dire — and asked him, “how is the White House gonna put a happy face on that?”

If past is precedent, and usually at the White House it is, he’ll come out and he’ll say this is proof that people get to be vaccinated,” Peter replied, prompting his dad to ask, sarcastically, “what vaccine do you get for job loss?”

Everyone then had a chuckle at Biden’s expense…

But about two hours later, news broke that the US economy actually added 467,000 jobs in January. A stunned Steve Doocy reacted on air by saying, “How did everybody get this so wrong?!”

"How did everybody get this so wrong?!" — Steve Doocy reacts to the strong jobs report about two hours after he joked about how it might show 300,000 jobs lost pic.twitter.com/MeDyHk2Prj— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 4, 2022

Everybody!

Of course, the mainstream press has its issues here too, most notably not taking into account that for much of 2021 monthly job estimates were consistently too low and revised upwards, resulting in Biden getting lots of negative headlines during a time in which job growth was extremely strong.