CNS Unemployment Coverage Distortion Watch, Headline Shenanigans Edition

Susan Jones’ main CNSNews.com story on July’s employment numbers started out this way:

Non-farm payrolls added a whopping 528,000 in July, more than double the estimate of 250,000; and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent in July from 3.6 percent in June.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that job growth was widespread, led by gains in leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, and health care. “Both total nonfarm employment and the unemployment rate have returned to their February 2020 pre-pandemic levels,” BLS noted.

You wouldn’t know any of that from the headline of the story, however,. which cherry-picked all the less positive numbers and crammed them in:”62.1%: Labor Force Participation Falls in July, As 239,000 More Americans Drop Out of Labor Force.” Jones didn’t mention any of that stuff until the third paragraph:

But on the downside, the number of Americans not in the labor force — no job and not looking for one — climbed above the 100,000,000 mark again, settling at 100,051,000 in July. That’s a 239,000 increase from June; and it follows an increase of 510,000 from May to June, when the number rose to 99,812,000.

The “not in the labor force” category includes retired persons, students, those taking care of children or other family members, and others who are neither working nor seeking work.People who don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one put downward pressure on the important labor force participation rate, which dropped a tenth of a point to 62.1 percent in July.

One might call the headline on Jones’ story false advertising. And even after conceding that the job numbers hit pre-pandemic levels, Jones still searched for a way to credit Ddonald Trump for having an even better economy pre-pandemic:

The participation rate was 61.4 percent when Joe Biden took office as the pandemic raged. Today’s number, 62.1 percent, is still below the Trump-era high of 63.4 percent in February 2020, just before COVID shut things down.

After rising for more than three decades, the overall labor force participation rate peaked in early 2000 at 67.3 percent and subsequently trended down. In recent years, baby-boom retirements have contributed to the decline in the overall participation rate.

Instead of his usual sidebar on government jobs, editor Terry Jeffrey wrote one on manufacturing jobs, admitting that they “increased by 30,000 in the month of July” and is “is now above what it was in the months immediately preceding that start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.” It must have painful for the Trump-loving Jeffrey to admit that.