The Labor Department reported a “better than expected” jobs report on July 7, showing 222,000 jobs added in the month of June.
However, ABC World News and CBS Evening News barely acknowledged the news spending just 12 seconds each just mentioning the number of new jobs and 4.4 percent unemployment rate. ABC reported June marked 81 straight months of job growth.
In contrast, NBC Nightly News spent more than eight times as much as the ABC and NBC evening shows combined between July 7, and 9, with 3 minutes 15 seconds of coverage of jobs.
Nightly News covered the jobs report twice, first on July 7, and again on July 9. On the second night, Nightly News included a report about the tight labor market in Colorado and how the the economy is so strong there some manufacturers are struggling to fill positions with qualified applicants.
NBC correspondent Tom Costello turned to Colorado, the state with the lowest unemployment in the U.S., and profiled a “high tech manufacturing plant” which is raising wages to attract people with the right skills to fill their openings. The CEO said the difficulty is finding people enthusiastic about working in manufacturing and with the right skills.
Costello also noted that 20 states now boast unemployment rates below 4 percent. The slight “tick up” in the national unemployment rate in June was due to people starting to look for work again.
Manufacturers added 1,000 people to the workforce in the month of June, bringing the seasonally adjusted growth in manufacturing to 53,000 new jobs since December 2016.
None of the three broadcast network evening shows mentioned that government jobs grew by 35,000 in June.
The good June report beat analysts expectations by nearly 50,000 jobs. And although the networks didn’t mention it, the previous two months were also adjusted upward by a total of 47,000 jobs. The number of employed hit a record at 153,168,000 people.
Univision’s evening newscast gave the jobs report 29 seconds of coverage the weekend of July 7-9, including the fact that unemployment for Latinos fell to 4.8 percent. Spanish-language competitor Telemundo did not cover the report.
