CNSNews.com’s coverage of January’s unemployment numbers managed to be even more dishonest than ever, thanks to CNS being desperate to put a positive pro-Trump spin on things.
The main article, by Susan Jones, sycophantically starts:
The new year is off to a strong start on the employment front.
The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that a record 154,430,000 people were employed in January, a gain of 309,000 from December.
The number of employed Americans has broken seven records since Donald Trump took office.
Jones waited until the 10th paragraph of her article to mention that only about 200,000 jobs were created in January, but added revised numbers from November and December to come up with her pumped-uup 309,000 number.
However, in a rare bit of honest reporting in her pro-Trump rah-rah piece, Jones did concede that “the number of Americans not in the labor force also set a new record at 95,665,000 – the fourth such record since Trump took office.”
It was up to CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman to spin tha hardest regarding the most negative number: the spike in black unemployment from 6.8 percent in December — a figure Trump was heavily touting over the past month — to 7.7 percent in January, a huge increase CNS would be repeatedly highlighting if a Democratic president was in office. Instead, Chapman buried the spike and insisted that the high number is still pretty darn good, under the headline “Black Unemployment Still Low at 7.7%“:
Although the black unemployment rate in December of 6.8% was the lowest ever recorded, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, the black unemployment rate of 7.7% in January was still among some of the lowest rates moving downward since last April.
As the numbers show, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate nationwide for black Americans, 16 years and over, was 7.7% in January 2018.
In April 2017 it was 7.9%; May, 7.6%; June, 7.1%; July, 7.4%; August, 7.6%; September, 7.0%; October, 7.3%; November, 7.2%; and December, 6.8%.
We hope Chapman got a bonus for his valiant effort to spin such bad news on behalf of the Trump administration.
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey contributed his usual pieces on government employment and manufacturing jobs. But even he couldn’t resist the siren song of dishonesty, writing in the manufacturing-jobs piece:
The last time the United States had more than 12,555,000 employed in manufacturing was in January 2009, the month President Barack Obama was inaugurated. In that month, there were 12,561,000 employed in manufacturing. But in February 2009, the month after Obama’s inauguration, manufacturing employment dropped to 12,380,000, according to the BLS.
Jeffrey omits the inconvenient fact that the country was free-falling into recession when Obama took office. And the chart accompanying Jeffrey’s article makes it clear that manufacturing jobs have been on an upward trajectory since about 2011, which undercuts Jeffrey’s implicit credit to Trump for the increase over the past year that is simply continuing past trends.