Unemployment

On Thursday, for the first time in American history, a state denied an electricity producer a construction license for a coal-fired power plant due to manmade global warming fears. As ominously reported by the New York Times Saturday (emphasis added): The Kansas Department of Health and Environment on Thursday turned down a permit for twin 700-megawatt coal-fired generators that a group of…

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…

When the Labor Department reported a net loss of 4,000 jobs for August, the September 7 ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts highlighted the bad news as evidence of an impending recession, but on Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the August number to a gain of 89,000 jobs and reported 110,000 new jobs for September (AP story), only ABC bothered to mention the revision while CBS…

If you watched any television newscasts Friday, or read a paper Saturday, you were bombarded with claims of doom and gloom as a result of the August unemployment report showing 4,000 fewer people on American payrolls than in July. Yet, what media largely ignored were shifting sociological population dynamics indicating this summer's poor jobs gains could be caused by the smallest percentage of…

Most Americans understand that unemployment declining is a good thing. Yet, the folks at the Associated Press seem confused about this economic statistic as evidenced by an article published Saturday entitled "Help Wanted Ads Go Unanswered in West." In fact, contrary to a media fixated on bashing corporations and business owners as greedy little devils, Matt Gouras' piece actually elicited…

Runner Up One of the Associated Press's earliest articles following Friday morning's release of the government's Employment Report, which showed July's unemployment ticking up 0.1% to 4.6% and new jobs increasing by 92,000, had this outrageous paragraph (backup link is here in case the article is revised or removed; bolds are mine): Construction companies slashed 12,000 jobs in July.…

In 1992, Bill Clinton successfully used a campaign strategy of continually focusing attention on the supposedly poor economy thinking that Americans typically vote with their wallets. Of course, most intelligent people know that the recession actually ended in early 1991, and that this strategy would have failed miserably had the media not been complicit, and, instead, honestly reported…

As NewsBusters has been reporting this week (see this and this), as the stock market hit new all-time highs, the media have been dour Nervous Nellies carping and whining about gas prices, the low value of the dollar, the housing slump, and the rising trade deficit. Yet, there are a variety of issues that press outlets have conveniently ignored during this record bull run that not only explain…

A new poll released Wednesday gave extraordinary evidence as to how continued negative reports from a bearish media have impacted the public’s view of the economy. As reported by Reuters (emphasis added): Two-thirds of those surveyed, 66 percent, said the direction of economic policy was fair or poor. Yet, these same folks are very optimistic about their own economic condition: