Positive Job Growth Continues Will
News Coverage Improve?
Two straight years of positive employment
numbers and more than 3 million new jobs but those facts havent
stopped the media from finding negativity in the strangest places.
The latest employment report marks 24 straight months of positive job creation in the U.S. economy more than 3 million jobs worth of good news. Yet, during that period network news has found plenty of negatives and has downplayed net employment gains on President Bushs watch, even comparing job growth to the Great Depression.
According
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 6, 2005, report, about 3.3
million jobs have been created in the past two years. The latest
numbers showed 274,000 new jobs were created in April and the report
also added 93,000 jobs to previous totals. Unemployment also held
steady at the low figure of 5.2 percent. But the media have
dismissed and ignored job growth and even found ways to portray it
as a sign of a bad economy.
Coming up on the presidential election, Dan Rather
jumped the gun with a highly inaccurate prediction. On Oct. 8, 2004,
the September jobs numbers showed positive growth, and Bushs first
term had more than three months left. Despite those facts, Rather
declared on the CBS Evening News, Its the first net job loss on
a presidents watch since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression
of the 1930s. He neglected to mention the devastating economic
effects of the 9/11 attacks, which reporters seldom acknowledge. Of
course, Rathers prediction also was wrong, as Bush ended his term
with a net job gain which Rather mentioned in a 77-word report on
the Feb. 4, 2005, broadcast.
Thats not the only time journalists have found
negativity in positive numbers. For example, on the Dec. 5, 2004,
NBC Nightly News, reporter Maria Bartiromo lamented positive job
growth: Certainly job creation has not improved all that much, she
said. One hundred and twelve thousand (112,000) jobs created in the
month of November was below what economists were expecting; 200,000
new jobs was what they were expecting, so this economy has changed.
Two months later, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics did its normal
revision, the November Employment Situation picked up more than
200,000 additional jobs. Such revisions are common, but reporting on
the revisions isnt. NBC Nightly News did not mention the
improvement.
Reporters frequently compared new numbers to
expectations, saying that economists predicted higher job growth
than occurred. Rather slipped this into his Feb. 4, 2005, broadcast:
The economy created fewer jobs than economists had predicted but
enough for President Bush to end his first term with a net job
gain. Rather didnt revisit his earlier declaration that Bush would
end the term with net losses.
Comparing the job totals to predictions as Rather did
is one way reporters cast positive numbers in a negative light.
Brian Williams, on the Dec. 3, 2004, NBC Nightly News, said,
Employers added just 112,000 new jobs last month. Thats the
weakest gain in five months, only about half of what economists had
forecast.
But it turns out that those conventional-wisdom
predictions are almost always incorrect, according to a
Goldman-Sachs study cited by The Dallas Morning News on August 30,
2004. The study found that job creation forecasts have consistently
come in higher than actual jobs numbers since 1999. Also, later
revisions to job numbers can have a significant impact on monthly
totals.
Good news sometimes merited only a sentence or two from
news anchors. On Jan. 7, 2005, Brian Williams gave the bare facts on
NBC Nightly News. He said, Employers added 157,000 workers to
their payrolls last month. The unemployment rate, by the way, held
steady at 5.4 percent. Decembers payroll additions bring the total
number of jobs added for a year now to 2.2 million. Thats the best
showing in five years. President Bush called this all a very
positive set of numbers.
Likewise, on the March 4, 2005, CBS Evening News, Dan
Rather simply said, The jobs picture continues to improve, citing
the creation of 262,000 jobs in February. His story included no
elaboration on the numbers or examples of businesses prospering.
This poor coverage of employment is part of an ongoing
problem for the media. A Business & Media Institute analysis of network
news coverage during the past six months showed how the media focus
more on negative economic news than positive. For example, the three
major networks devoted twice as much coverage to the spike in gas
prices as to employment news. Overall, there were 21 stories about
employment and 40 covering gas prices. ABC had the most pronounced
difference, covering gas prices more than five times as often as
employment.
The Business & Media Institute examined the evening news
programs on all three broadcast networks ABC, NBC and CBS
between Nov. 1, 2004, and April 30, 2005. This time period picked up
where the previous BMI jobs study left off. All stories that focused
on nationwide employment statistics were included. Stories that
examined the impact of rising gasoline prices were also analyzed.
Stories about oil price hikes were only included if they also
focused on the impact that would have on gas prices. No other oil
stories were included.
For more on coverage of jobs, please see the October
2004 Business & Media Institute study titled
One Economy, Two Spins. That study found inaccurate
reporting on jobs numbers as well as overwhelming negativity when
the incumbent president was Republican.
