Today the unemployment figures came out for the month of September, showing the overall unemployment rate staying the same at 9.6%. Hardly good news, to be sure, but the right-wing media was sitting with bated breath to attack Democrats over an unemployment figure that they expected to be worse. If you watched Fox & Friends this morning, you'd see that they spent a good deal of time obsessing over the upcoming news, how the unemployment rate was expected to climb, and how that “could spell big trouble for candidates in midterm elections,” specificallythat it would “spell big trouble for” Democratic candidates, in case you were wondering. Specifically, they cited Gallup's recently released unemployment figures, which estimated September's unemployment rate to be a whopping 10.1%. Take a look:

And Fox & Friends were far from the only Fox News outlet pushing Gallup's poll numbers. Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity pointed out the same thing on Hannity last night:

Greta van Sustern and Fox News contributor Karl Rove dissected how the numbers “must be devastating to the Democrats tonight” on last night's On the Record (accessed via Nexis). Special Report with Bret Baier also reported the Gallup figures on October 7. But, what's funny about their coverage is that many of us here at Media Matters couldn't recall hearing the Gallup figures reported on Fox before, at least not recently. And we certainly couldn't remember Fox reporting on Gallup's estimates in July, when they reported unemployment to be at 8.9 percent, which was significantly lower than the government's estimate. And a Nexis search confirmed that from June through August Fox did not report on Gallup's unemployment figures. So why now? Well, this is the first time since the beginning of the summer that Gallup's estimate has been higher than the government's estimate--and, this news comes just as the network is ramping up for the midterm elections:

We didn't hear about the Gallup estimate when it was 8.9% because it didn't fit the Fox narrative, which centers around anything they can use to attack the president and the Democratic Party. Fair and balanced?

Also, in case you were wondering, after the news came out that unemployment was better than they expected, Fox & Friends reacted with unrestrained joy: