Last month the press corps, particularly the Associated Press, struggled to recount the accurate number of jobs lost so far during the Bush administration. And with last week’s announcement of new employment numbers, history (as the old cliché would have it) is repeating itself as tragedy or farce, depending on just how jaded you are about the press corps.
The Labor Department announced last Friday that the economy added 308,000 jobs to the non-farm payroll in March. This reduces the total net jobs lost since January of 2001 to about 1.8 million, and the number of private sector jobs lost in the same span to roughly 2.6 million.
The comedy of reporting errors began yesterday with Mike Allen of the Washington Post. Although Allen mentions the increase for March, he fails to adjust his employment totals, writing that “the economy has lost a net of 2.2 million jobs during his presidency” — a number now outdated by a month.
Even worse, some members of the press corps continue to transcribe a Kerry talking point without providing the necessary context that even Kerry himself provided in an original press release.
Last week, the Kerry campaign released a statement noting that “2.6 million private sector jobs” have been lost during the Bush administration (emphasis ours).
But without contradiction, Reuters quoted Kerry stripping the number of any context and claiming that “The fact that George Bush thinks 2.6 million lost jobs makes for a fantastic and exciting economy shows how out of touch he really is.”
Likewise, CBS paraphrased Kerry: “Under attack from Democratic rival Sen. John Kerry for the loss of 2.6 million jobs on his watch …”
And making a similar mistake today, the New York Times quotes Kerry criticizing Bush because “he’s lost 1.8 million private-sector jobs” since September 11, 2001. That figure isn’t correct, either; according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the total number of private-sector jobs lost since September 2001, is 1.3 million.
To conclude this comedy of errors, we offer a small tip-of-the-hat to last month’s “job numbers” offenders the Associate Press, for today they are amongst the few that got it right. As Pete Yost wrote, “The economy gained more than 300,000 jobs last month, but 1.84 million jobs have been lost during Bush’s presidency.”
We sympathize with the press corps a bit; with candidates spinning numbers so consistently, it isn’t always easy to get the figures right. But that’s no excuse for throwing up one’s hand and declaring, like the infamous talking doll, that “math class is tough.”
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.