Fantasy Figures, Real Pain

[Geee]

American Thinker:



Early Friday morning, before the Department of Labor released its monthly jobs report, the mainstream media was reporting job gains of as much as 200,000 as more or less the consensus figure. Never mind that 200,000 was not the consensus among reputable economists. The mainstreamers wanted the jobs report to turn up as an assist to the Obama administration, and so they fudged their predictions.

None of those Friday-morning prognosticators will have to face the public again until Monday morning, and by then they will undoubtedly have "forgotten" how far off they were. If they were honest, principled journalists, they would issue a correction at the first opportunity. But that will never happen.

Of course, if mainstream reporters were truly professional, they would never have fudged the figures to begin with. They would never have spent the last two years bending over backwards to make excuses for every misguided policy of the Obama administration. They would never have spent eight years hammering the Bush administration and then indulging in a frenzy of biased reporting with the goal of electing Barack Obama.

By Monday morning these same newsrooms will undoubtedly have buried the story that the unemployment rate rose in November to 9.8%, well on its way to what reputable economists have long been predicting as a rate above 10% by early 2011. The fact that only 39,000 jobs were created in November is a sobering statistic, especially at a time when the broader unemployment rate stands at 17%.