Steve Doocy is offering further evidence that Fox News acts as the communications arm of the Republican Party. This morning the Fox & Friends host read directly from a “pundit prep” document provided to him by the Republican National Committee: “They said the three best ways to define the Barack Obama economy: the national debt, (which is skyrocketing), the unemployment (which is north of 8 percent), and gas prices”:

Either Fox News has been diligently following this memos for months, or the network and the GOP have simply been on the same page.

Throughout the past year, Fox has repeatedly ignored expert economists and hijacked debate about job creation in favor of an obsession with near term deficit reduction. In doing so, they helped manufacture a default crisis and cheered the resulting credit downgrade. Furthermore, they falsely claimed that President Obama has not laid out a plan for reducing the national debt over the long term.

As for the network's discussion of unemployment, they haven't let facts get in the way of getting out the Republican Party's message. As jobs numbers have improved, Fox has rushed to falsely discredit government data as “phony” and “fabricated”.

In line with the RNC directive, they have gone into overdrive in hyping high gas prices and assigning the blame to the president.

Of course, none of this is at all surprising for a network whose programming is at times almost identical to RNC campaign ads and has a history of passing off Republican research as its own, typos and all.