A Washington Examiner column attempted to negatively spin the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) jobs report for January 2016 by misleadingly claiming that the American economy shed 665,000 jobs last month. The column failed to account for seasonal adjustments in the data series.
On February 5, the BLS released its monthly "Employment Situation" summary for January 2016. The data showed that the economy created 151,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent -- its lowest level since February 2008. According to a Bloomberg survey of economists, the monthly job creation total came in below expectations but economist Kathy Bostjancic still called the report “very encouraging.”
This generally positive sentiment was lost on Washington Examiner columnist Paul Bedard, whose search for negative spin on the jobs report resulted in him pushing the misleading claim that BLS data actually shows “there were 665,000 jobs lost in January”:
New Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there were 665,000 jobs lost in January, a blunt finding that confuses the heralded report that 151,000 jobs were created in January in non-farm payrolls.
New York Times correspondent Josh Barro blasted Bedard's faulty conclusion on Twitter, noting that the Examiner columnist made the amateur mistake of looking at seasonally unadjusted payroll figures, which fail to account for temporary holiday jobs that disappear between December and January every year:
Here's the dumbest thing you will read on the jobs report all day: https://t.co/35qX2syALc
-- Josh Barro (@jbarro) February 5, 2016
This dude looked at the seasonally *unadjusted* numbers. Of course they were lower; employment is always lower in January than December.
-- Josh Barro (@jbarro) February 5, 2016
Retailers hire people for the holiday season and then lay them off, every year. That's a main reason we do seasonal adjustment.
-- Josh Barro (@jbarro) February 5, 2016
With baseline economic indicators consistently improving throughout the Obama administration, right-wing media outlets are becoming increasingly desperate in their attempts to cast the monthly jobs report in a negative light. Fox News and Fox Business misleadingly complained for three consecutive months about job creation figures that far exceeded economists' expectations.