Jeannine Aversa

..... But Misses Chance to Refute "Jobs Slashed" Claims.

It's good to see that someone else is on the case of the recession-obsessed Associated Press, particularly reporter Jeannine Aversa. But even the estimable James Taranto, in his Best of the Web column yesterday, let Aversa's most obvious and repeated error go by without comment.

Aversa started out her report yesterday ("When economy revives, how will we know?") by presuming to speak for all of us, and tinged it with a bit of brattiness:

With any luck, the second half of this year will be better than the so-far rocky first half. The Federal Reserve chief hopes that is the case. So does President Bush.

For the rest of us mere mortals, it feels like the pain is getting worse.

When the economy begins to snap out of its funk, how will we know?

Taranto pounced:

The business press's recession obsession continues:

• A couple of weeks ago, in the wake of the initial first-quarter GDP growth reading of 0.6%, Rex Nutting at MarketWatch.com entertained us with the notion that an economy can be in a recession even while there is real, if anemic, economic growth.
• Today, Jeannine Aversa of the Associated Press, with the help of a number of economists, told us that we can have a recession if growth is better than anemic -- even above 1.5%.
• Steven Matthews of Bloomberg went even further, as he assumed that we're in one now ("U.S. Recession to End by September, Business Economists Say").

This is getting ridiculous.

Let's start with the doleful dramatics of Aversa's report:

In the past several months, NewsBusters has seriously questioned the reporting of the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa given her proclivity to misrepresent economic data.

On Saturday, Aversa wrote an opinion piece that fully explained why she sees gloom and doom in every government statistic regardless of whether or not it's warranted.

Here's how Aversa began her analysis entitled "Good Economic News Something of a Mirage" (h/t NB reader R Anthony, emphasis added throughout):

The Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa really should change her writing focus, because economics is clearly not her specialty.

After telling readers in March that "Dangerous cracks in the nation's job market" are "ominous signs that the country is falling toward a recession or has already toppled into one," Aversa had the gall to report Wednesday, "The bruised economy limped through the first quarter of this year at a six-tenths of a percentage point growth rate as housing and credit problems forced people and businesses alike to hunker down."

Are you joking? You, your wire service, and virtually every media outlet in the nation have been telling Americans that we're already in a recession. A government report comes out saying that we're not, and this is how you begin your article covering the surprising announcement?

How disgraceful. Sadly, that was just the beginning (emphasis added, h/t NB reader PunditDotCom):

Is it just me, or is the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa doing an end-zone dance because she thinks that the recession Old Media has been pining for has finally arrived?

Someone needs to remind her that one negative quarter, if it even occurs, does not a recession make.

In an early-Saturday story on the economy, Aversa treated the recession as a lock in her first paragraph, even though the fifth paragraph betrayed uncertainty (bolds are mine):

It's no longer a question of recession or not. Now it's how deep and how long. Workers' pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs, the most in five years, and the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent. Job losses are nearing the staggering level of a quarter-million this year in just three months.

Did you know that 574,000 and 1.1 million more Americans had jobs in March than in February and January, respectively?

Seriously, as you can see on the right (data can be retrieved from this BLS page; select the very first "not seasonally adjusted" table).

Now the fact remains, as you can also see, that job growth during the past two months is nowhere near as great as it was during the same two months in 2006 (1.91 million) or 2007 (1.58 million). This goes a long way towards explaining why total employment, when adjusted for seasonality, fell 80,000 during March, and by 232,000 during the first quarter.

There's no denying that the employment situation has been deteriorating for several months, and I'm not trying to minimize that. What I am saying is that the "employees were thrown out on the streets during March" narrative cooked up by Old Media today, including the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa, is clearly false, either because Old Media reporters and their editors don't understand a concept as basic as seasonality, or they don't want to.

It wasn't good news by any means, but it also wasn't the end of the world.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported January 4 the unemployment rate rose to 5 percent in December, but if you're paying attention to the media coverage, you would think it's time to whip up some shoe leather stew and play "Brother Can You Spare a Dime."

A January 4 Associated Press story by Jeannine Aversa pointed to the job data as one of the "problems in the economy" that has "elevated fears about a recession." But even with all these "problems" - housing woes, the credit crunch, high oil prices, weak job numbers - the criteria of the economy being in a recession still haven't been close to being met.