NewsBusters' Brent Baker and Dan Gainor each did a fine job chronicling Old Media's weak coverage of yesterday's solid September Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Here's another Old Media non-followup on yesterday's news: Failure to get a reaction from two Democratic presidential candidates who had harsh things to say a month ago when August's weak employment report was released.
That August report showed a loss of 4,000 jobs. The Old Media "recession worries" chorus was deafening. August's job-increase number was revised upward to a pickup of 89,000 as part of yesterday's report. As noted by Baker and Gainor, Old Media reaction to that revision was relatively muted. I also don't see that anyone in Old Media pointed out that the total new-jobs increase, including prior revisions, was a gain of 228,000 jobs (September's initial +110,000 pickup, August's +93,000 revision, and a +25,000 revision to July).
The two leading Democratic presidential candidates opportunistically jumped on that initial August report and its supposed implications in early September, reporter Edmund Andrews noted in a New York Times article:
Democratic candidates used the first monthly decline in employment in four years to attack Mr. Bush. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said Mr. Bush’s economic policies demonstrated his “failure to lead."
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said the jobs data proved the administration’s strategy was "not working for working Americans."
With the reported change, one would logcially think (in vain, of course) that Obama might praise the president's leadership, and that Mrs. Clinton might inform us that the administration's strategy is indeed working. Failing that, one would hope that Old Media reporters might at least question the candidates' statements from last month, and ask them for "clarifications."
Don't wait by the computer for those clarifications to appear.
Related posts are at BizzyBlog.com and the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Wide Open blog.
