6-Year Low in
Unemployment Claims Draws Yawns from Media
Networks ignore the story while major
newspapers downplay it.
By Ken Shepherd
Free Market Project
Feb. 10, 2006
   Â
On February 9, the federal government announced that weekly jobless
claims hit the lowest average in six years – a sign of job growth in
a strong economy. That night, none of the network newscasts reported
the six-year low, and the following day, major newspapers all but
ignored the story.
   Â
“The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits was up
by just 4,000 last week, putting the weekly average over the past
month at the lowest level in nearly six years,” the Associated
Press’s Martin Crutsinger reported on February 10. “Analysts said
the big improvement in claims in recent weeks was apparently not a
fluke but an actual sign that the labor market has improved
significantly,” he added.
    Yet the February 9 editions of NBC’s
“Nightly News,” “CBS Evening News,” and ABC’s “World News Tonight”
ignored the news. The following day
The Washington Post relegated the jobless mention to one
sentence in an AP market brief;
The New York Times
ran a Bloomberg News digest which included three sentences on the
jobless figure, and USA Today’s Eric Nordwall included the story in
the Moneyline sidebar on the Money section’s front page.
    The Free Market Project has previously
documented how the
print and
broadcast media magnify and spin coverage of bad economic data
while downplaying good
jobs and
economic growth reports.
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