Unemployment

Plenty of Praise for July Jobs Report from Networks
By Curtis Houck | August 2, 2014 | 12:35 AM EDT

Released on Friday morning, the latest jobs report from the Labor Department touted a net growth of 209,000 jobs in July. On Friday evening, the report was promoted on all three of the major broadcast networks, ranging from news briefs by ABC and NBC to a full report from CBS. While there was plenty of praise and even an ounce of positive news, the networks mostly failed to note that the economy still has a long way to go.

Over on the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, substitute anchor James Brown provided a neutral outlook that while “[e]mployers added 209,000 jobs last month,” it was “not enough to meet demand” due to the fact that “[a]s more workers enter the job hunt, the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.2%.” His summary was followed by a report from CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason in which Mason profiled a woman who recently found a job after being laid off in 2011. [MP3 audio here; Video below]

AP Acknowledges That There Are 'Fewer Full-Time Jobs,' But Doesn't Cite Obamacare As a Contributor
By Tom Blumer | July 31, 2014 | 5:17 PM EDT

In a Thursday report on why many Americans are still unimpressed with the U.S. job market, Associated Press reporters Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak made a rare admission that "Finding a steady full-time job has become harder" than it was before the recession.

The AP pair then contended that "the trend might also reflect a lasting shift among restaurants and coffee shops," but found an "expert" who only acknowledged that such employers are trying to be more careful in their spending. Although they mentioned Obamacare as a reason why pollied Republicans are dissatisfied with the economy, Rugaber and Boak never cited the healthcare law as a possible factor in the significant move to employ part-timers, even though Investor's Business Daily has compiled a list of 429 employers "with strong proof that ObamaCare's employer mandate is behind cuts to work hours or staffing levels." Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

MSNBC Explores 'Kinder, Gentler GOP' on 'Ronan Farrow Daily'
By Laura Flint | July 25, 2014 | 5:40 PM EDT

According to MSNBC, Republicans are always making things worse. On the July 25 edition of Ronan Farrow Daily, the cable host began a segment entitled “Kinder, Gentler GOP?” after playing a clip of Rand Paul at the National Urban League annual conference speaking of the “poverty problem.” Farrow asked his guests a stream of leading questions insinuating that Republicans are “catering to a demographic that may have lost Republicans the last general election” rather than actually working to aid low income individuals. 

While the president of the National Urban League Marc Morial tried to avoid being too overtly political, MSNBC analyst and former DNC communications director Karen Finney made it clear that Republicans “tend to be policy ideas that actually make things worse, not better.” They oppose “things like an increase in the minimum wage or equal pay for women that we know could actually help communities of color.” (See video below)

Fever-Swamp Left Celebrates How CNBC's Steve Liesman 'Embarrassed' Rick Santelli; No He Didn't
By Tom Blumer | July 16, 2014 | 1:39 AM EDT

Paul Krugman at the New York Times and other fever-swamp leftists who, incredibly, are operating under the assumption that the economy has experienced an acceptable if uneven "recovery" during the five years since the recession ended are celebrating what they believe was an epic live "embarrassment" of Rick Santelli at the hands of Steve Liesman at CNBC on Monday.

A Google search shows that Mediaite ("CNBC Reporter Torches Rick Santelli"), New Republic ("CNBC's Rick Santelli Was Embarrassed on Live TV"), Talking Points Memo ("Watch CNBC's Tea Partier Get Told How Wrong He's Been"), Business Insider ("Steve Liesman Issued A Devastating Line To Rick Santelli"), and of course Vox ("Watch Steve Liesman demolish Rick Santelli's inflation fearmongering") are all piling on. Following the jump, I will show that Santelli only claimed to have been right about the direction of the economy for the past five years, after which Liesman changed the subject and hogged the microphone:

Press Won't Connect End of Jobless Benefits With Faster Job Growth; Krauthammer Does
By Tom Blumer | July 6, 2014 | 9:45 PM EDT

Fox News contributor and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer made a very interesting and logical correlation Friday. The press has predictably failed to make the connection or even to relay Krauthammer's point, simply because it leads to the default assumption that conservatives were right on an important economic issue.

To be clear, the point Krauthammer and National Review Online's Robert Stein made on Thursday isn't directly provable. But the fact that an acceleration in job growth and a significant reduction in the unemployment rate have occurred in the six months since extended unemployment benefits expired is hard to explain away as some kind of lucky coincidence — especially given the endless blather of "weather" excuses the press and the administration have made about the economy in general since early this year. Video and a transcript follow the jump.

AP: ‘Humming’ and ‘Rising’ U.S. Economy Is a ‘World-Beater’
By Tom Blumer | July 6, 2014 | 5:10 PM EDT

In the latest White House press release disguised as analysis at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, AP stenographer Paul Wiseman sang the praises of this nation's "humming" job market and its "steadily rising" growth as the economy is "finally showing the vigor that Americans have long awaited." Wow.

Of course, the White House — er, Wiseman — never mentioned the following (to name just a few): two straight months (April and May) of real declines in consumer purchases; the seasonally adjusted decline of 523,000 in full-time employment paired with an increase of 799,000 part-time jobs in June; April’s and May's trade imbalance coming in worse than March’s, which was already very high; shipments of durable goods barely budging in April and May; factory orders falling in May; or May's flat construction spending. It got worse, as Wiseman concocted five reasons why the U.S. economy is a "world beater." Excerpts from Paul's pathetic prose follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

CNN's Tom Cohen Baffled by the Obama Popularity 'Disconnect,' Holds Real Answers Until the Very End
By Tom Blumer | July 4, 2014 | 8:04 PM EDT

A prominent exhibit explaining why the nation's trust in its media establishment has dropped to precipitous lows would likely include Tom Cohen's Thursday afternoon column at CNN expressing befuddlement over President Barack Obama's unpopularity.

After all, Cohen's headline crows that under Obama we have "more jobs" and "less war" (!), so there's a "disconnect" which must be explained. To give you an idea of how pathetic his attempt is, he managed not to mention any form of the words "immigration," "scandal," or "contraction" (as in, the first-quarter decline in GDP) while pretending to present a complete analysis. Meanwhile, one of CNN's embedded headline links to another story ("Obama to Republicans: 'So sue me'") openly mocks Cohen, doing a better job of explaining the "disconnect" in six words than anything he wrote in his first 37 paragraphs. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post; numbered tags are mine):

Labor Secretary Perez: We've Trained '14 Million People Each Year' Since the Recession Ended
By Tom Blumer | June 27, 2014 | 11:06 PM EDT

Math is hard over at the Department of Labor these days, pretty much from top to bottom. Last Friday, the DOL listed what it says were the 31 states which showed "statistically significant" job growth in the 12 months ended in May. It turns out that six other states should have been on that list, dropping Ohio, which was the slowest-growing among those originally listed, from number 31 to 37. 

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, and apparently the rest of the country, has a really big problem. He claims that his department has trained 84 million workers during the past six years, yet millions and millions of Americans are somehow still unemployed. The opening portions of a speech Perez made on July 19 at the National Fund for Workforce Solutions Annual Meeting follow the jump (HT to a frequent emailer; bolds are mine throughout this post):

NewsBusted: Leave No Man Employed!
By NB Staff | June 20, 2014 | 6:14 PM EDT

"A record number of people in the U.S. are unemployed, and the Obama administration would rescue them from their situation, but they’re not AWOL from their military units."

To subscribe to NewsBusted via email, sign up here. To watch the Friday, June 20 edition, click play on the embed below the page break. To subscribe at YouTube, visit the NewsBusted channel here.

CNNMoney.com Emails Ignore Sharp Downward Estimates of First-Quarter and Full-Year 2014 GDP Growth
By Tom Blumer | June 18, 2014 | 6:10 PM EDT

Some readers here may have a tough time discerning why the economy's mediocre to stagnant performance isn't fully registering with the general public, which feels that things aren't going too well but still doesn't how weak the situation really is. The obvious answer is that the press overemphasizes any good news which appears and downplays marginal or bad news — while occasionally, as seen last night in Bloomberg's coverage of yesterday's largely miserable homebuilding statistics, pretending that bad news really was good.

Perfect examples of this problem came in two CNNMoney.com emails I received this afternoon. The emails has news which could be considered news, while leaving out some clearly bad news which delegitimizes their email's optimism:

Univision Report Reveals Downside of Hiking Minimum Wage
By Ken Oliver-Méndez | June 3, 2014 | 6:13 PM EDT

Liberals have long been used to dominating the narrative in news coverage of wage and poverty-related issues. The liberal perspective, in terms of what policies best represent the interests of  workers and the economy as a whole, sometimes goes entirely unchallenged.

A welcome exception to the rule occurred during the June 2 edition of Noticiero Univisión, however, when correspondent Liliana Escalante included the perspectives of a reputable economist and a Latino small business owner, both of whom clearly pointed out the negative, job-killing consequences of legislation in California that would raise that state’s minimum wage from its current $8 to $11 an hour beginning January, 2015.

Column: The Rich List and the West's Culture of Envy
By Cal Thomas | May 28, 2014 | 5:34 PM EDT

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- In the 1970s, while working as a low-paid cub reporter in Houston, Texas, I always looked forward to the annual Christmas catalogs from Neiman-Marcus and Sakowitz, a local luxury department store. Both contained outrageously expensive things that only the super-rich could afford -- his and hers Thunderbirds stick in my memory. My wife and I couldn't wait to thumb through them and we frequently laughed at how much some of the items cost, wondering if even rich Texans would spend so extravagantly.

Another tribute to conspicuous wealth comes in the annual "Rich List," a guide to the 1,000 richest men and women in Britain, published in a special edition of The Sunday Times Magazine. A fat feline sits proudly on the cover with the symbol of a British pound (in gold) around its neck.