The jobs report for December was the last one to come out under the Obama administration, so CNSNews.com had to get their last cherry-picking distortion of the numbers in while they could.
The main story by Susan Jones focuses, as usual, on the labor force participation rate, telling us that “the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009, when Obama took office.” Jones surprisingly concedes the dishonesty of that number, admitting that it is “continuing a long-term trend that began well before Obama was sworn in.” It’s not until the seventh paragraph that Jones reports that there is also a record number of Americans who are employed, and she buried in the 17th paragraph the fact that 156,000 jobs were created in December.
The first sidebar, by editor in chief Terry Jeffrey, bemoaned that manufacturing jobs continued to decline, glossing over the fact that — as the chart accompanying his article illustrates — manufacturing jobs have been on a general downward slope for a good 30 years. Jeffrey further bemoaned that there are more government jobs than manufacturing jobs.
The second sidebar, by managing editor Michael W. Chapman, once again played up relatively high black unemployment, implicitly blaming Obama while leaving out the important contextual fact that black unemployment has always been roughly double that of white unemployment.
The final sidebar, also by Chapman, repeats his imaginary claim that the U-6 number is the “real unemployment” figure, grousing that “it is not often reported by the mainstream media.” As we’ve explained, it’s a factual misnomer since that particular number counts people are employed part-time but seeking full-time work.
Next month will bring the first report of job numbers under Donald Trump. Will CNS be as diligent at cherry-picking numbers under Trump as it has been under Obama? We shall see.