In their coverage of government and other economic reports, the business press routinely tells readers that the figures they are relaying are "seasonally adjusted." That is, raw results are smoothed out to supposedly "remove normal, recurring variations" in data.
There's one notable exception: The government's monthly employment report.
Although it was very disappointing, the September Employment Situation Summary, which told us that the economy added only 142,000 seasonally adjusted jobs as hundreds of thousands of Americans withdrew from the labor force, was not the worst economy-related news of the day.
That dubious honor belongs to the Census Bureau's Factory Orders report. At least the employment report showed more people holding payroll jobs and overall August payroll employment 2 percent greater than a year ago. By contrast the Census report continued a nearly year-long pattern of declining year-over-year orders and shipments accompanied by still-bloated inventories. As anyone could have predicted, Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press completely ignored these alarming trends.
As part of a piece on Friday’s CBS This Morning about the opening of the first freestanding Chick-fil-a in New York City, correspondent Vladimir Duthiers couldn’t help but harp on the company’s conservative Christian values and how they had to supposedly draw customers back “in 2012 when those values ran afoul of public sentiment” after “CEO Dan Cathy affirmed his support for tradition marriage.”
Conservative filmmaker Phelim McAleer has a new film challenging Josh Fox and his claims about hydraulic fracturing. McAleer’s GasHoax will be released on October 1, the same day as Fox’s latest short film, GasWork, will be aired on MSNBC.
The head-to-head match up is intentional. McAleer said GasWork is “a zero credibility film because it comes from filmmaker Josh Fox who has a history of health hoaxes regarding fracking.” He has criticized Fox for his past claims about flammable water and breast cancer links, calling them “nonsense.”
August's seasonally adjusted Pending Home Sales Index value contained in the related press release from the National Association of Realtors was the lowest in the past five months, and 2 percent below April's level.
Disclosing the size of the recent slump apparently wasn't considered important at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press. What was news at AP, whose Josh Boak essentially copied NAR's release and added standard boilerplate about job growth instead of engaging in informative journalism, is that the index is up by over 6 percent from a year ago, even though that increase ended several months ago.
Thursday morning at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Christopher Rugaber opened his coverage of the Census Bureau's New Residential Sales report as follows: "Buoyed by steady job gains and low mortgage rates, Americans purchased new homes in August at the fastest pace in more than seven years."
Sorry, pal, it was the "fastest pace" in — wow — three months. The bureau's not seasonally adjusted home sales table told us that:
The competition for the most annoying aspect of establishment press business reporting is fierce. One which immediately identifies a reporter as hopelessly biased and ignorant is any reference to "laissez faire" as a condition allegedly present in any modern economy anywhere on earth.
"Laissez faire" is an economic concept involving "an economic system in which transactions between private parties are free from government interference such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies." There are no true "laissez faire" economies of any meaningful size, because they are all regulated to some extent. As we will see shortly, some in the press even employ the obviously absurd term "laissez faire regulation."
In the wake of the ongoing controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s diesel car emissions controversy, MSNBC reporter Tony Dokoupil wildly proclaimed that Republican politicians were cheering on the German car maker for deceiving the Environmental Protection Agency. Dokoupil appeared on All In with Chris Hayes Tuesday night and insisted that “[i]f you’re a Republican, if you think the EPA goes too far on stuff like this, this is almost like a heroic act by Volkswagen.”
Word on the street is that ESPN is planning to lay off "200 to 300" employees in the coming months.
The go-to euphemism surrounding the impending layoffs, according to Variety's Brian Steinberg, is "the changing media landscape," primarily the "cord-cutting" phenomenon. In July, the Big Lead blog, in discussing Keith Olbermann's expected departure from ESPN, explained that "millennials are eschewing expensive cable TV bills and streaming everything online." While that might explain flat viewership or even a modest decline, cord-cutting is only a minor part of the problem. Someone needs to explain why ESPN's ratings have fallen by a stunning 30 percent in the past 12 months.
All three broadcast networks Tuesday morning seized on a pharmaceutical company hiking the price of a prescription drug in order to promote Hillary Clinton’s call for new government regulation of the industry. At the top of NBC’s Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “5,000% hike?! The young drug company CEO under fire for raising the cost of a life-saving pill overnight....The controversial decision making it all the way to the campaign trail.”
The business press just can't understand why the Federal Reserve decided not to raise interest rates on Thursday. After all, these alleged journalists have been telling us for months bordering on years that U.S. economy is really in good shape. So it should be able to handle a rate hike, especially after over seven years of rates at essentially zero. The problem is that they now believe their own bogus blather. The U.S. economy is not in good shape, and data seen during the past several weeks show that the situation is deteriorating, not improving.
Excerpts from an early Friday report at the Associated Press by Josh Boak illustrate how out of touch the business press really is (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
The business press is trying to convince readers, listeners, and viewers that Janet Yellen's Federal Reserve kept interest rates at zero not because of U.S. economic conditions, which supposedly "look good" with "steady economic growth." No-no. She stayed the course because of the troubled tglobal economy.
Thursday evening, Reuters wrote that the Fed failed to move "in a bow to worries about the global economy, financial market volatility and sluggish inflation at home." Bloomberg directly blamed "China growth concerns." The Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger cited "a weak global economy, persistently low inflation and unstable financial markets." None of the three noted the deteriorating situation in the U.S., and the only item I could find which cited the Fed's full set of pathetic annual U.S. growth projections was a Wall Street Journal editorial.