"Fox & Friends" aired a nearly-four-minute video about President Barack Obama on Wednesday, drawing the ire of critics who say it looked, felt and sounded like a political attack ad.
"We decided to take a look back at the president's first term to see if it lived up to hope and change," co-host Gretchen Carlson said while introducing the video.
The video, produced by Fox News associate producer Chris White, attacks Obama's record on job creation and the unemployment rate—and includes a dramatic, "Star Wars"-esque soundtrack. It aired twice on Wednesday's show.
"The package that aired on 'Fox & Friends' was created by an associate producer and was not authorized at the senior executive level of the network," Bill Shine, executive vice president of programming at Fox News, said in a statement to Yahoo News. "This has been addressed with the show's producers."
The video "resembled propaganda films from 1930′s Europe," Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik wrote after the segment first aired. "And the remarkable thing was the the witless crew on the couch that serves as hosts for this show had the audacity to present it as journalism and congratulate the producer who put it together."
"I don't disagree with much, if anything, in this video presented earlier today on 'Fox & Friends,'" Ed Morrissey wrote on HotAir.com. "But does this make anyone uncomfortable at all in regard to its source?"
According to the progressive watchdog group Media Matters, the segment is the equivalent of $96,000 of free advertising for the Republican Party and Mitt Romney, who clinched the 2012 GOP nomination on Tuesday.
A post on the Fox Nation site calling the piece a "must-see Fox video" was taken down, and the segment was later removed from FoxNews.com.