April Unemployment Back Up to 9%; 27th Month Above 8%
By Julia A. Seymour | May 06, 2011 | 10:45
The April jobs report showed 244,000 job gains, “surprisingly strong” numbers according to the Kansas City Star. Many national news outlets reported that jobs number as well as the rise in unemployment rate back to 9 percent in their headlines immediately reacting to the news.
CNBC initially suggested that the unemployment rate “ticked” up because of higher participation in the labor force, but a CNBC.com story a bit later said “nothing in the data suggests that. The labor participation rate for April, in fact, stood unchanged at 64.2 percent.”
In another CNBC.com story they also said “the numbers suggested that a good portion of the boost came from McDonald’s, which moved to hire 50,000 workers last month.” While encouraging signs, don’t expect the news media to advertise that April was still the 27th month in which the unemployment rate was above 8 percent.
Almost as soon as Obama took office, his administration promoted and passed a $787 billion stimulus package using the selling point of keeping the unemployment rate below 8 percent. By that measure the stimulus has been a complete failure.
The news media, particularly the broadcast networks, have spun unemployment news for years; favoring Clinton and Obama, while berating Bush.
The Business & Media Institute found that in 2005-06 when Bush was president and the economy was strong and unemployment never went above 5 percent, the networks aired negative reports or spun stories negatively 58 percent of the time. In contrast, despite nearly 10 percent unemployment throughout the 2009-10 period leading up to the midterm elections, positive jobs reports and stories spun positively made up 52 percent of the stories.
Back in 2004, NBC’s Anne Thompson added a remark to the end of a good jobs report that made things seem worse. The May 2004 jobs report noted the creation of 248,000 new jobs. Thompson’s report was good, until the end when she declared, “The job market, finally gaining momentum. But is it enough to get over 8 million unemployed Americans back to work?”
Viewers who weren’t watching closely had to be baffled by the sudden reference to “8 million unemployed Americans” that Thompson described. That number was the total of the unemployed. Not only was it the identical percentage to the same month during the Clinton presidency (May 1996), but had Thompson bothered to ask any economist, they would have told her that the economy never provides total (0 percent) unemployment.
Other reporters like ABC’s Betsy Stark made wildly incorrect negative predictions during the Bush presidency. On May 3, ABC “World News Tonight” Stark warned that the upcoming Labor Department numbers would be bad news: “And the next jobs report on Friday should tell us about how much the economy slowed down.” Three days later, the government said the total number of jobs created was 274,000, the best initial report of 2005. Stark didn’t bother to correct her very wrong prediction.
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Comments
The lengths the liberal MSM
Submitted by Beukeboom on Fri, 05/06/2011 - 11:18am.
The lengths the liberal MSM will go to try to put a positive spin on this especially to protect their "chosen one" Obama is just simply mind-boggling.
New Name for the MSM
Submitted by tvhall on Fri, 05/06/2011 - 12:24pm.
We should call them the KPM (Knee Pad Media).
Biased reporting on econ so bad - broad public stores it away as
Submitted by Gary Hall on Fri, 05/06/2011 - 12:48pm.
The biased reporting on economic news [data] is so bad and so habitual, that the broad public stores it away as a historical "just what it is." In the end, the public is indoctrinated. From Carter - to Reagan. From Bush to Clinton. From Clinton to Bush. and lastly from Bush to Obama; it's the same story each time - both as the news happens, and then later as the MSM looks back on history.
We all know [here] that the Clinton dot.com (Enron) bubble collapsed almost a full year before Bush took over, and that with it every leading economic indicator had turned on it's head, either abruptly reversing direction before the crash, or in concert with it. We all understand, here, that once that bubble crashed, all of the little (nice) surpluses and the projected paper budget surpluses, as well as employment numbers, were to immediately take tremendous hits as a result of that economic crash.
None of the shift in fortunes [say, from 2001 thru end of 2003) had anything to do with the Bush administration, i.e., it was inherited (or partially cyclic), yet, given thousands of opportunities our national MSM media has likely never blamed any of it on Clinton, choosing instead to present, or to allow any shrill voice crossing their path to repeat any and all partisan talking points in blaming it all on Bush, while praising the Clinton record. In looking back, would any journalist ever interview President Clinton, or one his administration, seeking to find out how they felt about the disaster they left behind? What they did wrong? Have they every asked President Bush how he dealt with what he inherited?
Will they ever interview Pres. Clinton, or his HUD Sec., Andrew Cuomo, and ask them how their major historic housing and aggressive lending policies gave birth to the housing bubble which ultimately took the whole world to it's economic knees? I'd wager that if we lined up all of the national MSM's journalists, and asked them point blank, "Can you explain how Andrew Cuomo's regulations of the late 1990's created the housing bubble (?)," that 95% of them, would not even understand what the question was about.
Will they ever refer to the Bush tax cuts (needed to reboot the economy) as the Bush stimulus plan? Will they pose the question to a Democrat, "Don't you think that Bush's stimulus was more effective than Obama's? OK, that was really a tease - of course they will not. Fox won't even do it?? Will someone help me understand this?
Among other economic accomplishments of President Reagan, would be the great gains made by minorities, not only in jobs, but in education as well. While on occasion, buried deep into a newspaper, like the NY Times, a lone story quoting such information released does manage to be printed - that's usually the end of the coverage. Yet, how many hundreds of times have we had to sit through yet another long dissertation on how blacks suffered under Reagan? The don't suffer under Carter, Clinton or Obama?
On the streets of America, the public listens to and reads the broad national mainstream media's daily spin at each and every turn, about how bad, questionable, negative, and unfair economic data plagues Republican administrations, and how wonderful, promising, productive and surprisingly good economic data follows the Democrats everywhere they go.
(;~/ gary
Makes you wonder
Submitted by DontFeedTheTrolls on Fri, 05/06/2011 - 1:18pm.
I wonder if McDonalds made a deal: 50,000 job offers in trade for a waiver on health care.
If it weren't for our massive
Submitted by jdhawk on Fri, 05/06/2011 - 2:29pm.
If it weren't for our massive debt at all of levels of government, we wouldn't have to put trillions of dollars through our Federal Reserve to pump up equities. We would have the flexiblity, due to reserves in good times, to not have to borrow from our great grand children to save today.
If you don't know what happens if this continues - the massive debt that is growing at the rate of nealy 2 trillion dollars a year at the federal level alone- then read this: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,761201,00.html .
The news of a ;possible move by Greece away from the Euro has cut in half the euphoria in the stock market over the good employment numbers released by the BLS this morning. We may even go into negative terroritory by the end of the day.