Spin Cycle: MSNBC Excuses Bad March Jobs Report
The March jobs report which showed only 120,000 jobs gained, when roughly 200,000 were expected, was a disappointment and some reason for concern about the recovery, according to The Washington Post.
But on left-wing MSNBC, there were “silver linings,” “good news” and plenty more spin on this economic story.
During
Martin Bashir’s program the picture on the screen said “Upswing” with
picture of people in suits. Bashir interviewed journalist and author
William Cohan who said this month’s data was a “pothole” and that one
month is less important than the trend.
“The
last three months we’ve created an average of 212,000 jobs a month,
which is pretty darn good, and the overall rate of unemployment has come
down to about 8.2 -- some people have said, ‘well, that’s because
people have stopped looking for jobs’ -- but look, I think we’re on a
very solid trend now. As you said, 4 million new jobs in four years,
that’s something to be pretty proud of,” Cohan said. But neither Bashir,
nor Cohan pointed out that since February 2009 there has still been a net loss of 740,000 jobs. And the Obama administration has fallen far from keeping its jobs promises.
James
Pethokoukis wrote for The American that “The Obama Jobs Gap is up to 15
million missing jobs,” on April 2, 2012. His chart showed that “It
would take 15 million net new jobs to restore the ratio of employed
people to total population to where it was in 2007, before the Great
Recession.”
But
those facts didn’t phase MSNBC. MSNBC host and NBC’s Chief White House
correspondent Chuck Todd made sure to point out that the 8.2 percent
unemployment rate was a “three-year low,” and interviewed economist Mark
Zandi who has “provided advice”
to the Obama adminstration. According to Todd, Zandi is “the person we
always like to turn to” on jobs report Fridays. No wonder, Zandi
proposed that the “silver lining” to the report was that state and local
governments were laying off fewer people.
He
also supported Obama’s idea that “if state and local government hiring”
was at the level of private sector hiring, the unemployment rate could
be as much as a point lower. Todd “dived” into this, again quoted Zandi,
and said that the rate would be two-tenths of a point lower if we’d
lost only half of the public sector jobs that we actually lost. Then
Todd bashed the GOP with a study from Mike Konczal of the left-wing and
Soros-funded Roosevelt Institute that focused on state jobs cuts in
states that went red during the 2010 election.
Todd
bolstered the liberal report that had been published by The Nation
saying, “ it makes you wonder about the idea that you can promote job
growth on one hand, while slashing the size of government on the other.
Do the two go as hand to hand as folks think, maybe Federal level is
different from state and local?”
Todd
also used some of Zandi’s comments about the labor force participation
rate later in his “Daily Rundown,” to attribute fewer people seeking
work to retiring baby-boomers and less immigration.
Following
the Rundown, weekend anchor Alex Witt (filling in for Chris Jansing)
downplayed Obama’s unemployment record on “Jansing & Co.” by stating
the rate had “peaked close to 10 percent.” Actually, it peaked at 10
percent (once revisions were made that lowered it from 10.2). She
interviewed former Obama green jobs czar, Van Jones, and democratic
strategist Krystal Ball about the March report. Ball argued that one
month could be an aberration and suggested the data could be revised
upward.
That’s
the same argument Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to Vice
President Joe Biden, made during “MSNBC LIVE” when he declared, “one
month does not a trend make.”
Anchor
Thomas Roberts introduced the jobs report that hour saying, “There is
good news for the country this morning, and we’re going to talk about
the unemployment rate, it did fall once again inching closer to 8
percent with clear job gains, but it also means some tepid news for the
Obama administration because of the caveat: those gains fell short of
expectations.”
Ironically,
during “NOW with Alex Wagner,” Wagner herself noted that the White
House was putting a “positive spin” on the underwhelming jobs report.
Too bad she didn’t acknowledge how much spin her own cable network was
doing on its own that day.
Wagner
found a “silver lining” during that segment too. She noted that the
number of long-term unemployed fell from 5.4 million to 5.3 million and
then said of part-time workers: “this is a little bit of a silver lining
fell from 8.1 million in February to 7.7 million.”
During
“Andrea Mitchell Reports,” the idea was floated that warmer weather had
increased hiring in earlier months, and viewers were cautioned not to
focus too much on a single month of data.
Such
spin is the exact opposite of the way the news media treated presidents
with an R next to their name. President George W. bush was forced to
defend 5 percent unemployment, and a 9.4 percent unemployment rate was “good news” under the Obama White House, but “all” bad for President Ronald Reagan.
MSNBC’s
sister network, NBC, is currently under fire for its coverage of the
Trayvon Martin story. The Media Research Center has called about
Congress to investigate Comcast/NBC News for its editing of the George Zimmerman audio, which make it appear Zimmerman was a racist.
