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A Tale Of Two Economies In The Headlines
Take a look at these headlines:
The President’s Jobless Recovery
Frustrated Job Seekers Cause Jobless Rate To Drop
Economy Adds Few New Jobs
Low Jobless Rate Reflects Lost Hope
US Jobless Rate Drops But For Wrong Reasons
Recent headlines regarding the drop in the unemployment rate from 9% to 8.6% right?
Wrong.
Those are headlines from January 2004, when the jobless rate dropped to 5.7% and when President Bush was just starting a re-election campaign.
Here are headlines from Friday’s job numbers:
Unemployment Rate Drops To 8.6% Raising Hopes
Jobless Rate Drop Could Boost Obama
Obama Gets Economic Indicator He Can Crow About
Good News On Job Front For Obama
Jobless Rate Lowest In 2.5 Years
See the difference? I am not one to go one about “the liberal media.” That would indicate the media as a whole has a sought after liberal agenda (and some of them do but they’re easy to spot). The problem is, most journalists have an inherent bias that affects their reporting. They just don’t realize it. It just comes out naturally. The majority of those who work in journalism are Democrats/liberals.
The reality is, the headlines that described the jobless rate in 2004, fit perfectly with the jobs report that came out on Friday. Only 120,000 jobs were created in the month of November. Granted, the October jobs report was revised upwards by 70,000 but that is still not anywhere close to the numbers needed for nearly a half point drop in the jobless rate.
The real reason for the percentage drop was due to the number of people who gave up looking for work. Remember, the unemployment rate reflects the percentage of Americans who are actively seeking a job. When over 300,000 people give up looking for employment, that is reflected in the job numbers, hence the drop.
But the mainstream media has largely ignored this fact. Thus the headlines we see above.
![5527928310_e26be19cee[1]](http://www.therightsphere.com/wp-content/uploads/5527928310_e26be19cee1-300x223.jpg){kind=small}
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22 Comments
Seasonal jobs could also explain the new jobs numbers. The numbers also usually do not include students and the underemployed.
Nice catch, but it makes me want to hurl.
Goldberg’s book “Bias” spoke about this very thing and preferred to use Bias vs. Liberal Media because it really is mostly subconscious.
Great work digging this up! Obama would kill for a 5.7% unemployment rate.
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It would be helpful if you attributed the headlines to specific publications.
You should go on about the liberal media because that it is. The old/big media most definitely has a liberal agenda which is to get Democrats, Progressives and Socialists elected at any price. For some young, fresh out of college journalists it may be subconscious/inherent; those people are brainwashed. But the editors and seasoned journalists who approve and write those headlines know exactly what they are doing…that is why they do it.
I don’t agree. I think the bias is on purpose.
Not intentional? This morning Rattner was on Morning Joe with some charts, including new unemployment filings. Last week, of course, this number popped up above 400,000 again after falling below that level in recent weeks. However, the chart he showed was one week behind – stopping on 395,000 from the prior week. When Rattner shows this chart he’s asked, by Joe S. I believe, what it means and Rattner says, paraphrasing, below 400,000 is good and above is bad and even points out that we’re below that level. And none of the “journalists” at the table, all of whom surely recalled the news from just last Thursday, said a thing.
I saw something similar, this past summer, with Tom Brokaw. On the Monday after Q1 GDP ‘lost’ 75%, roughly, of it’s magnitude and Q2′s initial number was lower than expected Brokaw cited the ‘old’ Q1 growth number in a discussion of how Obama was doing. This was no accident – Brokaw even paused before he unleashed his phony number, seeming to consider whether he could get away with it given the headlines from the previous Friday.
Wow, it wasn’t very hard to turn up counter examples. Paul Krugman for cryin’ out loud.
CBS: Both parties skeptical of sharp drop in unemployment rate
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57335597-503544/both-parties-skeptical-of-sharp-drop-in-unemployment-rate/
Is the drop in unemployment rate really a ‘false positive’ for Obama?
http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/is-the-drop-unemployment-rate-really-a-false-positive-for-obama
Jay Hancock’s blog: Unemployment drop isn’t as impressive as it seems
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-hancock-unemployment-1202-m,0,3787576.story
Unemployment rate decline not as good as it sounds
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/On-the-Economy/2011/1202/Unemployment-rate-decline-not-as-good-as-it-sounds
Paul Krugman
“The measured unemployment rate has trended down for a while, but it’s all basically reduced numbers of people actively searching. My favorite measure these days is the employment-population ratio for prime-age workers, which isn’t affected by changing demography. Here it is for the past decade; see the trend since the recession officially ended? Neither do I.”
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/meh-and-i-say-that-with-feeling/
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Hey @Smokey! Are you familiar with hyperlinking and how the intertubes work?
Great post. Can you do a similar search for articles concerning oil and gasoline prices. I just can’t believe that there aren’t riots in the streets over $100/bbl crude, whereas any price spikes during the Bush years featured calls for “windfall profits” taxes in order to demonize oil companies.
In fairness to @Smokey, the links were added after he commented.
[...] it’s not like the mainstream media isn’t there to help. Follow the link to check out how the media has slanted exactly the same jobs report news when a [...]
[...] Now: Unemployment Rate Drops To 8.6% Raising Hopes Jobless Rate Drop Could Boost Obama Obama Gets Economic Indicator He Can Crow About Good News On Job Front For Obama Jobless Rate Lowest In 2.5 Years [...]
Um…..Why are the Bush headlines from no name small town U.S. (one is from Madison, IN whose population is under 12,000.) and the headlines for Obama are from National newspapers (one from the UK)?
There is liberal bias. It would have been very east to compare cable news headlines on their websites and headlines from national newspapers like the Wallstreet Journal. We don’t have to stoop to these levels to prove liberal bias.
@cgp – Krugman is a columnist not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination. In addition, he’s so far to the left that he almost comes full circle. He criticizes Obama for not having us in a 2.2 trillion dollar deficit hole.
Jeff Klein is a conservative Republican and I would expect him to write it up that way.
The CBS article talks about “both parties.”
I distinctly did not look at pieces by bloggers or columnists because they’re going to put their own spin on it.
[...] The Right Sphere has the MSM dead to rights on this one. Night… Take a look at these headlines: The President’s Jobless Recovery Frustrated Job Seekers Cause Jobless Rate To Drop Economy Adds Few New Jobs Low Jobless Rate Reflects Lost Hope US Jobless Rate Drops But For Wrong Reasons [...]
If you look, these are headlines from the AP that the local papers are affiliates of and used.
Because the news is over 5 years old, I used Google News archives to link the stories Brock was referring to. It’s much harder to do that than it is to open up random cable news sites and link the headline that day.
So that’s why. I don’t think using AP headlines and local papers (which people still read, by the way) is stooping to any low levels.
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