I was watching the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends this morning when they announced that the Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) numbers for the quarter of April to June 2012 were just being released. As the hosts repeated that the GDP for the quarter “was 1.5%,” viewers might have wondered whether that was an increase or a decrease. Fortunately, there was a graphic to tell the viewers that it was a decrease. . .
Unfortunately, the graphic was wrong. While the GDP number still was not great news, it was not as bad as the graphic, which would have meant we were in early 2009 numbers. Instead, there was a 1.5% increase in the GDP for the most recent quarter, not a decrease, which was slightly ahead of what most economists expected. The producers soon caught the mistake and corrected it.
The hosts continued speaking without acknowledging the error. I realize everyone makes mistakes, and they did correct the error within a minute or two. But when you are a major network, you might want to at least admit you made a mistake before some lame blogger points it out.
