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Hit Job
Networks Emphasize Layoffs
In A Year of 2 Million New Jobs
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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More than 2 million new jobs were created in 2005 but that wasn’t
the story presented by the evening news. The three broadcast
networks downplayed strong growth and, instead, emphasized negatives
such as corporate layoffs and outsourcing in more than half the
stories about jobs or unemployment. As Trish Regan of “CBS Evening
News” put it in the July 20 broadcast, “Twenty-five thousand layoffs
and more on the way. I’m Trish Regan with why the jobs picture is
looking very ‘pink’ these days.”
    Colored reporting like that has left the Bush
administration’s economic record black and blue. With the
president’s upcoming State of the Union address on January 31, the
economy will come under fresh scrutiny, so it is essential to
separate the facts from the media spin. Roughly 4.8 million jobs
have been added since August 2003 – 29 straight months of positive job
growth. Unemployment dropped down to 4.7 percent, lower than the
average of all three recent decades.
    These findings are the result of a detailed analysis of
job and employment coverage by the Media Research Center’s Free
Market Project (FMP). FMP studied 151 stories on the 2005 evening
news shows from all three broadcast networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – to
assess how they had reported on both job losses and gains during a
year of strong employment growth. Here are the conclusions:
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Job Losses, Not
Gains: The networks focused on job losses in slightly more than
half the reports (76 out of 151). Just 35 percent of the stories
addressed job gains (53 out of 151). In one typical report, Jim
Acosta of the “CBS Evening News” left his viewers with a memorable
image of the 8,700 job cuts at General Motors in his November 21
story: “Just three days before Thanksgiving, GM is carving up its
work force like a Butterball turkey.”
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Government Spending
Promoted: Two of the big Washington stories – the transportation
bill and cutbacks at military bases – showed how hypocritical the
media were. The $284 billion transportation bill was filled with
pork, but created thousands of new jobs that news reports barely
mentioned. But when military bases were cut to save $48 billion over
20 years, the news shows did three-and-ah-half times as many stories
bemoaning the job losses.
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283,000 Jobs Ignored:
Initial unemployment reports are later revised, but the networks
ignored those revisions. In 2005, most of those changes added jobs,
so network news skipped nearly 300,000 jobs in all of the stories
except those few that included cumulative totals.
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CBS the Worst
Network: By embracing the highest percentage of job loss stories
and the lowest percentage of stories about job gains, CBS presented
a skewed picture of employment. Reporter Trish Regan’s July 20
broadcast was one of the year’s worst. After a quote from Fed
Chairman Alan Greenspan about “sustained economic growth,” she
undermined it. “But his sunny forecast isn’t being felt on the
factory floor – Kodak cutting up to 10,000; Hewlett-Packard 14,500
layoffs – or on the streets, where reality trumps forecasts.”
Despite those numbers, the overall economic picture doesn’t reflect
Regan’s “reality.”
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ABC the Best: ABC
presented the highest percentage of stories about job gains of all
three networks. In addition, “World News Tonight” did nearly as many
stories about jobs gained as a result of the transportation bill as
it did about jobs lost due to the military base cutbacks.
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