The folks at Reuters issued a pretty sloppy video yesterday relating to the government's June jobs report.
That videos described yesterday's reported jobs gains of 223,000 as "broad-based." That's true only if you think having 222,000 of yeaterday's those seasonally adjusted gains occurring in service industries, while only 1,000 were seen in goods-producing industries, is "broad-based":
Here's a screen grab from that video showing how "broad-based" the gains were:
Here's the full video. The babbling about "broad-based" begins at the 0:34 mark:
Relevant portion of the transcript:
The employment gains were broad-based. Services cranked out the most jobs, led by professional and business services, healthcare and retail. Mining continued to lose jobs amid weak energy prices. Construction growth was flat and manufacturing added few jobs.
Earlier in the video (at the 0:10 mark), the wire service, while reporting that prior-month jobs gains were revised downward, showed a graphic which didn't reflect those revisions:
The graphic still incorrectly reflects last month's reported May job gains of 280,000 and April gains of 221,000. Thursday's report took those figures down to 254,000 and 187,000, respectively — a far from insignificant combined reduction of 60,000 jobs.
Finally the video, at about the 1:20 mark, has a Standard & Poor's economist speaking of "wages climbing higher but slowly." June's average hourly private-sector wage was unchanged from May.
Even with those flaws, in some respects, the report isn't too bad. At least it notes that the unemployment rate fell, "but for the wrong reasons," because over 400,000 civilians left the labor force.
But it's almost as if the wire service had completely sunnyside-up copy ready for publication, and missed correcting the two elements noted above, both of which are embarrassingly wrong, and both of which (how convenients) are in the direction of making the job-market situation look and seem better than it really is.
Pay closer attention next time, guys. Better yet, go back and fix the video.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
