Unemployment

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…

The Associated Press's business writers just won't let go of their claim (or is it audacious hope?) that we are in a recession -- not heading towards one, but actually in one. Despite yet another decent economic report, this one on productivity, the AP's Martin Crutsinger downplayed a significant beating of expectations, and continued to invoke the R-word (bolds are mine): Worker productivity…

Despite all the gloom and doom, the employment picture in April was much better than economists had expected, and, maybe more important, quite different than the Hooveresque, Depression Era picture media members have been painting for months.Makes you wonder if in press rooms all around America, as well as in Democrat campaign headquarters across the fruited plain, there was a huge sigh of…

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…

Oklahoma's unemployment rate, which was a seasonally adjusted 4.3% and 4.4%, respectively, in September and October 2007 (4.1% and 4.2% unadjusted), has fallen to a seasonally adjusted 3.1% in both February and March of this year (3.5% and 3.2% unadjusted). The unemployment rate in most states has gone up from September 2007 to March 2008. In states where the rate has gone down, none has shown…

For months, NewsBusters has been warning readers of the likelihood that media will adopt the 1992 Clinton playbook of regularly depicting the economy as being far worse than it really is.On Sunday, the Democratic National Committee released a new television advertisement attacking GOP presidential candidate John McCain with economic statistics that don't measure up to even the slightest scrutiny…

Do we all get free wooden shoes? Barack Obama didn't say. But he does have an Impossible Dream to cut poverty that would make Don Quixote proud. Put people to work . . . building windmills. His idea came in response to a question at last night's Compassion Forum on CNN from Jim Wallis, a leading member of the religious left whose focus is "social justice." Wallis wanted Obama to commit to a…

CORRECTION: This item originally cited Ace of Spades as having uncovered that Obama's mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, a man with Communist roots. It was in fact Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media. I regret the error. Religion is the opiate of the masses. -- Karl Marx, 1843It's not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to . . . religion . . . as a way to explain their frustrations. --…

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…

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…