Tag: bureau of labor statistics
'Fox & Friends' Just Couldn't Handle That Huge February Jobs Report

'Fox & Friends' Just Couldn't Handle That Huge February Jobs Report

A strong monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) beat expectations last week, but Fox & Friends struggled to characterize it, absurdly claiming that the numbers reported by the government had missed expectations while arguing with no evidence that the data were unreliable.

On March 4, the BLS released its initial jobs report for February 2022, which showed the economy creating 678,000 jobs last month as the national unemployment rate fell slightly to 3.8 percent. The report also included substantial positive revisions to the jobs estimates for December 2021 and January 2022, showing job creation over that period to be “92,000 higher than previously reported.” The topline job creation number for February easily exceeded expectations reported by MarketWatch and Reuters, which forecast 400,000-440,000 jobs created last month.

None of these facts were good enough for the team at Fox News, which honestly seemed almost unprepared to discuss the breaking news. The Fox & Friends studio at first struggled with audio issues when returning from commercial break, and then flashed a red upward arrow on screen seeming to indicate that the unemployment rate had climbed last month (the rate actually fell 0.1 points). After correspondent Carley Shimkus finished reporting the numbers, noting twice that the monthly jobs report beat expert expectations, all three co-hosts — Pete Hegseth, Brian Kilmeade, and Ainsley Earhardt — fumbled their transition to discussing the jobs report with Fox Business host Charles Payne.

The absurdity continued during Payne’s supposedly expert commentary, as he claimed without any evidence or reasoning that he “thought it was going to be a higher number,” saying the report was “really weird.” When pressed by co-host Pete Hegseth about the fact that the report actually beat expectations, Payne doubled down, falsely claiming “everyone thought it was going to be higher.” As Payne listed off made-up expectations and unnamed sources who thought the economy would add 770,000 or more jobs last month, a graphic again flashed on-screen demonstrating that the 678,000 jobs added last month were more than the 400,000 “predicted” by economists.


PETE HEGSETH (CO-HOST): Charles Payne is here, host of Making Money on Fox Business, who is going to help us break down these numbers. Your reaction, Charles?

CHARLES PAYNE (FOX BUSINESS HOST): I thought it was going to be a higher number, I really did. Now, this is not unusual that they missed, and this is really weird. Let me just explain to the audience.

HEGSETH: Okay now, higher number – this is a higher number than expected?

PAYNE: Than consensus, right. But, everyone thought it was going to be higher. I saw some folks on Wall Street at 770, and some even higher than that. Just so you understand how this consensus things [sic] works. Last month, it was 300,000 better, but the month before that they missed it by 200,000, the month before that they missed it by 340,000. In August of last year, they missed it by 515,000. Forget about it, go back to April 2020, and they missed it by 2.2 million. You know, so, the consensus thing, let's look past that for a moment.

We’ve got almost 11 million job openings, we’re still not at the participation rate we were at just before the pandemic. So, this is a good number, but it could have been even better than this. For me, what’s more important is participation, I don’t know what that is just yet, because we want people coming back to the labor force, right. Also, wages. Now, wages were expected to go up 5.8 percent. Normally that’s good, but we’re going to find out next week that inflation, during this same time period, probably up more than 8 percent. So that means any raise you got was evaporated.


Throughout Payne’s commentary, he seemed confused about how the BLS reporting process works, and he ignored a key component of the entire process by which numbers are revised over time. For example, Payne said that the previous jobs report for August 2021 had missed its expectations by 515,000 jobs, totally ignoring the fact that subsequent revisions had made up for half that gap.

Payne also struggled to explain how economic forecasters form “consensus” expectations, and complained about low labor force participation rates, even though the report he held in his hand showed an increase in that rate from month-to-month.

Eventually, the Fox & Friends team got their footing and returned to the bread and butter misinformation we’ve come to expect from Fox News. Unable to coherently describe the economic data in front of their eyes, the team pivoted to complaining about President Joe Biden’s energy policies and mocking teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg for somehow contributing to both increased gas prices and Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Fox’s almost comical hot takes on the routine data release stand as a reminder that the Fox News propaganda machine will never miss an opportunity to cast the economy in a negative light, so long as it reflects poorly on Democrats.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Economy Soars While Media Repeats Jobs 'Expectations' Narrative

Economy Soars While Media Repeats Jobs 'Expectations' Narrative

Reprinted with permission from PressRun

The U.S. economy just set the record for the most jobs created in one year, but you’d never know it from the continuing doomsday economic coverage under President Joe Biden.

The new jobs report, released last Friday, offered the latest evidence of the purposeful disconnect the media maintain, and specifically how journalists rely on consistently unreliable “expectations” for job report numbers in order to portray the results as “disappointing,” and to paint a picture of a faltering U.S. economy even as it shatters growth records.

The U.S. economy just posted 199,000 new jobs in December, during a pandemic surge. That sounds like a good thing, right? Especially considering that in December 2020, under Trump and during another wintertime pandemic surge, the U.S. lost 140,000 jobs. Instead, the press was uniformly pessimistic about Friday’s news.

It was a “major disappointment,” CNN announced, despite the fact employee wages hit record heights and the unemployment rate tumbled to 3.9 percent. (Last winter, the CBO predicted it would take five years for the U.S. to reach an unemployment rate that low.) NPR stressed the US added “only” 199,000 jobs. Hiring had “faltered” the New York Times reported. All because the key number failed to meet estimates.

The expectations game is set by economists and banks which publish their estimates on the eve of each job survey. It’s an easy-to-use model the press has employed for decades to analyze monthly results. But economists’ expectations no longer work during the pandemic. They’ve been wildly inaccurate during the Biden recovery and should no longer serve as the determining factor in how jobs reports are presented by the press.

“During one of the most volatile periods in recent memory, private and public-sector economists have a less firm grasp of what the labor market is doing,” the Wall Street Journal recently conceded. During 2021, economists cumulatively missed the jobs mark by well over 1 million jobs. And that’s in a year when the U.S. created more than 6 million jobs, the most since records began in 1939.

The expectations model often produces dubious journalism. When last November’s job report was released, NPR quickly announced it was a “bust” because just 210,000 jobs had been created. But back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy was “revved up” because 225,000 positions had been added.

Why the drastically different NPR spin for the Biden and Trump years? Expectations. Trump’s 225,000 job gains surpassed that month’s modest expectations, while Biden’s 210,000 fell short of estimates.

Another key hurdle is that the government has shown for the last year that it chronically undercounts, by large margins, the job gains data that are released to the public, and when it goes back and quietly post revisions they’re mostly ignored by the media.

August was a perfect example. That month’s initial jobs report claimed 235,000 jobs were added, which prompted lots of “disappointing” news coverage based on the established expectations. That total was soon revised all the way up to 483,000 new jobs, a development that received little press attention. Look at last September. The initial report announced 194,000 jobs. (“Lackluster,” announced NBC News.) After two revisions, the job total nearly doubled to 379,000.

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 on January 9, “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?

Why The Media -- And Republicans -- Owe American Workers An Apology

Why The Media -- And Republicans -- Owe American Workers An Apology

Reprinted with permission from PressRun

When Republicans launched a frontal assault on American workers earlier this year, the press was right there to help them echo their bogus claims. Both should now apologize for smearing the U.S. workforce.

Belittling would-be employees for being "lazy" and living off the government dole as generous unemployment payments swelled during the pandemic, conservatives invented a bogus economic theory that President Joe Biden had created a nationwide worker shortage.

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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy

GOP Claims Weak Jobs Report Proves America Doesn’t Need Biden Plan

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Republicans are trying to argue against President Joe Biden's jobs plan by pointing to Friday's national jobs report, which showed April's numbers were lower than what economists had been expecting.

Friday's report, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, estimated that employers added 266,000 jobs last month — down significantly from March — and that the unemployment rate was nearly unchanged at 6.1%.

That was enough to spark Republican outcry.

"Today's jobs report is a disappointment—just like President Biden's plan to burden families with more taxes & more debt," wrote House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. "While Dems trap people in a cycle of fear & pay them NOT to work, it's clear the best thing to do is end the crisis-era policies & get Americans back to work.

"This #JobsReport is a clear message to @JoeBiden that his policies are not working," tweeted the Senate Republican conference. "This is not the time to raise taxes. Unemployment bonuses paying people more to stay home than to work are the wrong idea. That's a disincentive to work."

"This is the biggest miss in the history of the jobs report, and Biden is to blame. He won't demand schools open, hurting women the most. He destroyed energy jobs. He wants massive tax hikes," claimed Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel. "His policies are a disaster, and the last thing we need is $4 TRILLION more of them."

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who is in the midst of attempting to unseat House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney, claimed on Twitter that "Joe Biden & Nancy Pelosi own today's horrendous jobs report."

"This is the Biden/Pelosi economy," she wrote. "Trillions in proposed tax increases. Trillions in uncontrolled spending."

Biden, however, has proposed a $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan, which would invest in roads, bridges, water systems, transit, child care, clean energy, and caregiving infrastructure, to bring the country out of its Trump-era economic slump. The plan would be funded by increasing corporate tax revenue.

He has also offered a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan to provide universal pre-K, free community college, guarantee paid leave, expand access to child care, and make health care more affordable. That proposal would be paid for with a tax increase for those making at least $400,000 a year.

Republicans have opposed both plans, objecting to the tax increases and most of the spending. But experts say the American Jobs Plan would actually create millions of jobs.

One recent analysis done at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce predicted that even a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package would create or preserve 15 million jobs over the next 10 years.

A Moody's Analytics report estimated that should Biden's plan be enacted, the economy would create 19 million jobs — 2.7 million more than without the investments.

The New York Timesnoted Friday that for millions of Americans, child care and health concerns are keeping them from trying to rejoin the workforce. Biden's plans would provide the infrastructure to make it possible for many of them to return to work.

Ironically, Republicans previously opposed much of Biden's jobs plan as unnecessary and warned it might overheat the economy by being too effective.

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has repeatedly warned that Biden's plans might cause inflation. "It's time for Biden to wake up from his liberal dream and realize that reckless spending has consequences, inflation is real and America's debt crisis is growing. Inflation is rising and Americans deserve answers from Biden now," he said in an April 9 statement.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued in March 11 that the economy was about to "boom," but that it would have nothing to do with Biden's pandemic relief package.

"The American people already built a parade that's been marching toward victory. Democrats just want to sprint to the front of that parade and claim credit," the Kentucky Republican opined.

"2021 is set to be an historic comeback year. Not because of far-left legislation that was passed after the tide had already turned. But because of the resilience of the American people."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.