There was "good" but "not great" news on the unemployment front in September with 103,000 jobs added, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate remained 9.1 percent.
But even with that growth, Obama's jobs promises have fallen far short [1]. His economic policies were supposed to create 4 million jobs by the end of 2010. Now, ten months later the economy is still dealing with net job losses of 2,229,000 since February 2009.
Adding to that the 4 million promised jobs and Obama's administration is 10 months late and 6,229,000 jobs shy of meeting its job creation claims. With slightly over a year left in his term, America would have to average about 390,000 new jobs every month for Obama to see that many jobs created.
Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog noticed that even with the uptick in job growth in September, when seasonally adjusted, jobs are trending downward [2].
Unemployment is a huge concern for Americans right now. In September, Gallup found that it overtook "the economy" as "the most important problem facing this country today."
The president has been campaigning to spend another $447 billion to fix the jobs problem, after his first $787 billion stimulus failed to solve the unemployment crisis.
In September, the 9.1 percent unemployment rate was rarely mentioned in "jobs" stories on the network news.
The Business & Media Institute analyzed 79 stories on the broadcast evening news programs that mentioned "job" or "jobs" between Sept. 1 and Sept. 26 and found only 18 (23 percent [3]) of them actually mentioned the 9.1 percent rate or said that unemployment was above 9 percent. Stories about "job" approval, people doing their "job" and other non-economic references were not counted.
Just as the networks have downplayed the high unemployment and looked for hopeful signs on jobs during much of the Obama presidency, reporters continued to find "good news" about unemployment to talk about last month.
CBS "Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley shared "a little bit of good news on jobs [4]" on Sept. 7, 2011. He led into a report about Obama's proposed jobs plan by optimistically reporting that in July there were 3.2 million job openings posted by employers. "That's the most in nearly three years," Pelley said without noting the huge shortfall between available jobs and the roughly 14 million who were unemployed in August.