Unemployment

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…

ABC's "World News Tonight" had a hard time on Friday without normal anchor Charles Gibson, as in its segment about the employment numbers released by the Labor Department, guest host George Stephanopoulos said the figures were from January 2008.This was stated as a graphic came on the screen reading "JOBS LOST, January 2008, 63,000." Of course, Labor's report was for the month of February.Sadly,…

There's no denying the economy is slowing, and may have either entered a recession, or is on the brink of one. Maybe.However, the media's hysterical response to Friday's February jobs report lacked any historical reference to how the labor market behaved in previous recessions.Instead, press outlet after press outlet decided that the loss of 63,000 jobs in February was a clear signal the…

For years, NewsBusters and the Business & Media Institute have regularly complained about the abysmal financial coverage offered by the mainstream press while accusing media of consistently painting a negative -- and oftentimes fallacious! -- picture of the economy.On Friday, a perfect example of such was illustrated by the Associated Press whose article about the February unemployment data…

Here's is the core information the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa had to work with today in the Employment Situation Report released by the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): The "Dec.-Feb. change" column was added by me, but is easily calculated from the data in the BLS report. What Aversa did with this info, and my comments, are after the jump. (see also Noel Sheppard's post…

On Sunday’s CBS "60 Minutes," anchor Steve Kroft interviewed Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, along with a small group of Ohio Democratic voters who, as Kroft explained: "told us that both race and gender would be hidden factors in southern Ohio, that many blue collar workers here won't vote for a woman, and others would never vote for a black." Kroft went on to focus on Obama: "And Senator…

Admission: over the course of my NewsBusting, I've actually developed a certain admiration for Bob Herbert. Not that I agree with virtually anything the NY Times columnist has to say, but that I appreciate his directness and the absence in his work of the superfluous sarcasm that marks that of a number of his colleagues.That said, I offer up Herbert's lament of this morning, "Where Are the Big…