CNSNews.com keeps up the unemployment shuffle in reporting on August’s employment numbers, with the lead article by Susan Jones once again putting undue emphasis on the labor force participation rate and using it to declare there was “little or no improvement from the prior month” — while burying the fact that 151,000 jobs were created, waiting until the fifth paragraph of her article to mention that fact.
Jones’ article is joined by a sidebar from CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey, who laments that “Government employees in the United States outnumber manufacturing employees by 9,932,000.” He does concede, however, that this is not a new phenomenon — government employees started exceeding manufacturing employment in 1989 — but he doesn’t concede that this has occurred under Republican administrations as well as Democratic ones.
A couple days before the government numbers came out, however, CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman wrote an article with a headline declaring, “Real Unemployment 9.7%.” The “real employment” number Chapman is promoting is from Gallup, which claims that “Widely reported unemployment metrics in the U.S. do not accurately represent the reality of joblessness in America.”
But as pollster John Zogby points out, Gallup CEO Jim Clifton is using the “real employment” number to push the idea that the government’s numbers are nothing but a “big lie.” That thinking is in line with the right-wing media, which has similarly tried to undermine unemployment statistics.
Indeed, Donald Trump has followed in CNS’ footsteps by falsely portraying the labor force participation rate as the unemployment rate.