Another “test”??

Once it’s an accident, twice it’s a conspiracy :


fakenews2.jpg

It looks like great news for Bush…but it’s a bullshit number :
U.S. businesses added 96,000 jobs to payrolls in September, the government reported on Friday, a weaker-than-expected total that was expected to sharpen a presidential debate later in the day over the economy’s direction.

The Labor Department report, showing the unemployment rate in September held steady at 5.4 percent, will provide fodder for the second debate between President Bush and senate Presidential contender Sen. John Kerry. It was the final jobs report before the Nov. 2 presidential election with polls indicating that jobs are of paramount concern to voters.

The September job-creation total came in below Wall Street economists’ forecasts for 148,000 new jobs. The department also revised down its estimate of August new jobs to 128,000 from 144,000 it reported a month ago.

What’s up with the trend of fake pro-Bush stories lately? I can understand the Fox News story with the fake Kerry quotes, since they’re partisan assholes, but in the last 24 hours we’ve seen “accidental” stuff from the Associated Press and MSNBC.

Memo to producers : If you really need to test your publishing system, here’s a few words for you to remember. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ipso facto”


posted by greg on October 8, 2004 @ 8:39 am

7 comments

  1. The article states that it is 300k jobs for the quarter, so it isn’t really a bogus number. If I remember correctly, I think the US needs to create 125k jobs per months just to break even, so if it said that there were 375k jobs created, we would only have broken even for that quarter. As it is, the 96k figure is anemic.

    Comment by Chaz — October 8, 2004 @ 8:53 am

  2. Oh shit. I guess I overlooked the word “quarter”. My bad. Of course there are still three problems with this :

    1) There’s no way the last three months of job creation numbers are “a boost for President Bush”

    2) The numbers were significantly below economists speculation.

    3) The 300,000 figure is still wrong. If you add up the last three months, it’s only 282,000 jobs.

    Comment by greg — October 8, 2004 @ 9:23 am

  3. Yeah, I saw the word quarter and still knew it was crap so the post is a good one.

    Comment by eRobin — October 8, 2004 @ 9:24 am

  4. Maybe MSNBC is just rounding those numbers up to make it look nicer and easier for Bush to understand.

    Comment by Chaz — October 8, 2004 @ 9:26 am

  5. The headline is simply misleading.

    If the headline was no problem at all they would have left it up -they didn’t.

    It was biased, plain and simple.

    Comment by sgo — October 8, 2004 @ 10:37 am

  6. It’s changed now:

    Modest payroll growth
    In a blow to President Bush, the U.S. economy created only 96,000 new jobs in September, fewer than economists had predicted.

    Did someone call them on it? Or did they just actually read the report instead of listening to the spin?

    Comment by Shane — October 8, 2004 @ 10:39 am

  7. I called them. And it sounded like I was not the only one.

    Comment by sgo — October 8, 2004 @ 10:48 am

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