Focused on job losses, not gains...

Here's an interesting piece on how our news media present a distorted employment picture (Thanks to Betsy N):

The Free Market Project (FMP) report, Hit Job, is the result of a detailed analysis of job and employment coverage by all three broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS and NBC. The study examined 151 stories on the 2005 evening news shows to assess how they had reported on both job losses and gains during a year of strong employment growth...

..."More than 4.6 million jobs have been added since May 2003 -- 31 straight months of positive job growth," Gainor added. "Unemployment dropped down to 4.9 percent, lower than the average of all three recent decades."....

You would never know it from watching TV "news."

...-- Job losses, not gains: The networks focused on job losses in slightly more than half the reports (76 out of 151). Just 35 percent of the stories addressed job gains (53 out of 151). In one typical report, Jim Acosta of the "CBS Evening News" left his viewers with a memorable image of the 8,700 job cuts at General Motors in his Nov. 21 story: "Just three days before Thanksgiving, GM is carving up its work force like a Butterball turkey."

-- Government spending promoted: Two of the big Washington stories -- the transportation bill and cutbacks at military bases -- showed how hypocritical the media were. The $284 billion transportation bill was filled with pork but created thousands of new jobs that news reports barely mentioned. However, when military bases were cut to save $48 billion over 20 years, the news shows did more than three times as many stories bemoaning the job losses...

This is particularly egregious. Base closures have almost always created more jobs than they destroyed. And the base-closing program is in fact a triumph by the US political system, where, as with all governments, it is almost impossible to end established government programs. I suspect the news people are trying to fool themselves as much as the public; they are clinging to Lefty zero-sum economic ideas.

-- 283,000 jobs ignored: Initial unemployment reports were later revised, but the networks ignored those revisions. In 2005, most of those changes involved the addition of jobs, so network news ignored nearly 300,000 jobs in all of the stories, except those few that included cumulative totals...

Economic reports are routinely revised, as more data come in. And routinely ignored by the media, if the revisions make Republicans look good. I remember the same thing in the Reagan years. (Or rather, I learned the same thing after the Reagan years, just reading this and that. There was no easily accessible Internet back then, so you had to stumble on the right article...

--CBS the worst: By embracing the highest percentage of job-loss stories and the lowest percentage of stories about job gains, CBS presented a skewed picture of employment.

Reporter Trish Regan's July 20 broadcast on the "CBS Evening News" was one of the year's worst, according to FMP. After airing a quote from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan about "sustained economic growth," Regan allegedly undermined it. "But his sunny forecast isn't being felt on the factory floor -- Kodak cutting up to 10,000; Hewlett-Packard 14,500 layoffs -- or on the streets, where reality trumps forecasts."

Regan had opened her segment with the following: "Twenty-five thousand layoffs and more on the way. I'm Trish Regan with why the jobs picture is looking very 'pink' these days."...

Most new jobs are created by new and small companies. Job cuts, especially the big ones, tend to be in mature industries, where companies compete by becoming more efficient, or where they are being battered by economic change. If General Motors lays off 10,000 people, and a thousand small companies add ten people each, guess which makes a dramatic news story? Or which is even visible without poring over dry statistics?

Also, lay-offs can be a sign of economic strength. Boeing can hire 20,000 people at a busy time because it knows it can lay them off if they need to. European companies are always very reluctant to hire anybody, because of laws that "protect" workers from being fired by ogre capitalists. That "protection" is a disaster to the many people who would like to become workers, but can't find jobs. (And those "protections" are what liberals would like to have here. Voting Democrat is voting against workers.)