Unemployment

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…

Touting a new CBS News/New York Times poll on Friday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Maggie Rodriguez teased an upcoming segment on the poll’s findings: "Is America broken? In a new CBS News poll, 81% of Americans believe this country's on the wrong track. Never has that number been so high." Co-host Harry Smith later introduced the segment by declaring: "A new CBS News/New York Times poll shows 81%…

Business & Media Institute Managing Editor Amy Menefee appeared on "Fox & Friends" on April 2 to discuss the media's involvement in sparking recession fears. Rescuing viewers from "solid recession talk," Menefee said that specifically network news reports already "have gone far beyond recession, they are already concerned about a depression." "They're not tell-they're not…

Just how obvious is it that the media's economic and business coverage is so negatively skewed that it has to be part of a political agenda in an election year? Obvious enough for the folks at Fox News to do an entire segment Saturday morning asking the extraordinary question: "Media ‘Talking Down' the Economy to Get a Dem Elected?" Despite my surprise seeing "Cavuto on Business" begin with…

A recent AP story about 50-year-olds moving back into their parents homes because the economy is so bad is one of the best examples of taking anecdotal evidence and stretching it into a universal truth that I have seen for a while. Filled with the sadly common "many say" and all based on the tale of one person who moved back home at 52, the AP magically discerned a national trend. This is the…

.... and in 24 Hours, with No Credible Support In a report from the presidential campaign trail in Wyoming early Saturday morning, Sara Kugler of the Associated Press picked up on an economic meme created out of whole cloth by one of her colleagues, and treated it as an undisputed fact -- all in the name of creating support for campaign rhetoric coming from one of the two remaining Democratic…