This post has been updated.
The economy added 114,000 jobs in September and unemployment declined to 7.8 percent. Not great numbers, but paired with major upward revisions to previous monthly reports and taken in the context of a slowly recovering economy, the report was viewed as good news for America.
Unless, of course, you were hoping for bad news. And apparently quite a few of President Obama's critics were — so much so that they suggested the Bureau of Labor Statistics was part of a vast conspiracy.
The leader of the "job truther" movement: former GE CEO Jack Welch.
"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers," he said on Twitter.
He had some friends in Congress too. Rep. Allen West (R-FL) tweeted "I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here." He added on Facebook that the jobs report was "Orwellian to say the least and representative of Saul Alinsky tactics from the book 'Rules for Radicals.'"
FOX News' Stuart Varney apparently sensed where his audience was going. Within minutes of their release he told viewers that "there is widespread mistrust of this report and these numbers."
"How convenient the rate drops below 8% [for the] first time in 43 months, five weeks before the election," he added later.
CNBC host Jim Carmer said he was pilloried by viewers for defending the BLS report's integrity.
"This is very hot. You believe the number, you must be a card-carrying Communist," he joked on the air.
Betsey Stevenson, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama, said in a phone interview with TPM that the conspiracy theories were misguided in just about every way possible. For starters, the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn't currently run by a political appointee. For most of Obama's term, the commissioner was a holdover appointed by President Bush. The current acting commissioner John Gavin is a career BLS economist, not an Obama appointee.
The underlying data behind the BLS reports is also publicly released and used by analysts across the private sector and academia, meaning a conspiracy would have to survive scrutiny from trained economists of all political stripes.
Nor is there much time to cook the books at the top level if they wanted to.
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