Eric Boehlert: Economy soars while press plays jobs "expectations" game [View all]

[babylonsister]

https://pressrun.media/p/economy-surges-while-press-plays


Economy soars while press plays jobs “expectations” game
Preferred narrative
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago


snip//

Why the big revisions lately? Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys 145,000 employers, extrapolates data, and produces an initial estimate of monthly job gains or losses. Lots of employers don’t initially reply, so the BLS goes back a second time, which produces the revised number. The problem is that during the pandemic, the percentage of employers who are responding to the survey has dropped dramatically, which means the initial numbers are less reliable. Yet those numbers are still the ones the press blasts out in headlines the first Friday of every month, when the unemployment figures are released.

It’s a one-two combo: The BLS is regularly undercounting jobs, which is bad news for the White House, and economists are regularly overestimating what the monthly BLS jobs number will be, which is also bad news for the White House. Then when the BLS revises the monthly gains, the media are nowhere to be found.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

That means Biden just oversaw a stunning jobs-creation year, while consumers were constantly fed headlines about “disappointing” jobs reports because the initial reports didn’t align with skewed “expectations.”

There’s also the lingering suspicion that the press simply likes to tell bad economic news — and hide upbeat newsflashes — during the Biden years. Just look at this pretzel-logic headline from the Washington Post yesterday, “2021 Shattered Job Market Records, But It’s Not as Good as it Looks.”

When last summer’s blockbuster July jobs report showed a jaw-dropping gain of nearly one million jobs, “NBC Nightly News” completely ignored the development. NBC did the same thing for the October survey, which announced a robust 531,000 jobs. It certainly feels like there’s a preferred media narrative in play.

The current approach for how the press handles monthly jobs reports isn’t functioning as it should. So why do journalists stick to the broken model?