Last week in Virginia, President Obama made a fairly basic point about succeeding in business: you benefit not just from your own initiative, but also from the successes and contributions of others, including government. Since then, Fox News has led the way in tearing two sentences of Obama's argument out of context and distorting them to claim that the president said small business owners deserve no credit for their own success. Now the Romney campaign has picked up Fox News' distortion of Obama's comments, and Fox News is reporting on Romney's use of the false attack they helped create.

Yesterday morning's Fox & Friends aired a deceptively edited clip of Obama's remarks, which host Gretchen Carlson called “startling.”

Campaigning in Pennsylvania this afternoon, Romney himself repeated the distortion of Obama's remarks, and characterized it as “insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America and it's wrong.”

And shortly afterward, on Studio B, Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron reported on how Romney attacked the president using the same quote his colleagues enthusiastically distorted.

To top it off, the Romney campaign posted a video on YouTube that is literally nothing more than 15 seconds of Obama saying just one sentence -- “if you've got a business, you didn't build that” -- over and over.

Following the pattern, we'll likely soon see Fox News reporting on Romney's video of the Obama quote Fox News ripped out of context in the first place.

Because that's how echo chambers work.