Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) had an oops moment on his radio show Monday, and this one’s going to leave a mark.

Speaking about America’s media landscape in general, Huckabee suggested that without Fox News acting as a counterweight to “mainstream media,” most Americans “will assume that Obama really is just doing a great job and he just can’t get those crazy Republicans to help him out.”

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Huckabee’s guest, former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R), who’s now gone to work for the Romney campaign, added that the major news networks defend President Barack Obama from negative economic news, calling the president America’s “whiner in chief.”

“I think a lot of people, if all they do is listen to conservative talk radio and maybe watch Fox News, they assume that all of America is getting what I would call at least a balanced approach to understanding that there are a lot of real problems going on that Obama could do better on,” Huckabee said. “But if people only watch the three big networks and BS-NBC, as I like to call them — MSNBC — if they watch BS-NBC and the three networks, then I think sometimes we may be kidding ourselves because a lot of people will assume that Obama really is just doing a great job and he just can’t get those crazy Republicans to help him out.”

While it is absolutely fair to say that without Fox News, Americans would have a better — or at least more accurate — view of President Obama and global affairs, recent empirical analysis has proven beyond any doubt that the “mainstream media” is decidedly not in the tank for the current administration.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed reporting on all the Republican presidential candidates over the course of one year, ending May 6, 2012, then compared them to President Obama’s media metrics. They found that Romney has received overwhelmingly more positive media coverage than President Obama, although coverage of both men remain in negative territory.

“You can argue that negative coverage of the administration is justified,” The Atlantic‘s James Fallows explained. “You can argue that incumbents are — and should be — held to a tougher standard, since they have a record to defend. But you can’t sanely argue that the press is in the tank for Obama, notwithstanding recent ‘false equivalence’ attempts to do so.”

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This audio is from The Huckabee Report, broadcast Monday, June 5, 2012, as snipped by the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters.