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Research/Study
MAGA media respond to annual jobs report revisions with conspiracy theories
Pro-Trump media claim that the routine BLS revisions are “cooking the books” and “election interference”
Published
Earlier this week, economists with Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo predicted that upcoming benchmark revisions scheduled to be published on August 21 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics would show a negative revision of up to 1 million net jobs created over the past year. (The actual preliminary estimate published this morning was -818,000 jobs.) In response to these negative expectations, right-wing commentators, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and advisers to his campaign swung into action.
Fox News and other pro-Trump media trafficked in conspiracy theories, even falsely suggesting that the United States is in recession, in response to the BLS’ annual benchmark revisions of employment data between March 2023-24. They ludicrously claimed that jobs numbers had been fabricated to benefit the Biden administration and that the BLS was “cooking the books” in service of the Democrats’ presidential campaign.
The right-wing histrionics neglected to mention how the same BLS published negative revisions during the Trump administration, including -501,000 in 2019, nor that the same benchmarking process in 2022 actually revealed that the government had significantly undercounted job growth. Additionally, as Bloomberg reported, this revision is routine and occurs every year as “a more accurate but less timely data source” that “covers nearly all US jobs” becomes available.