Musicmystery
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Here's the thing, Rich--
You claim the bias is there, but can't demonstrate it. You post "examples" that don't point to the bias. I've noted along this journey that in fact, the coverage is damn balanced, and yes, you just brush it aside.
So now you pull up one story, point to an interview with a labor leader--in a story about unemployment--and claim that's bias? Here's the entire story--I'm seeing multiple sources, not a single interview:
Broader Measure of U.S. Unemployment Stands at 17.5%
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: November 6, 2009
For all the pain caused by the Great Recession, the job market still was not in as bad shape as it had been during the depths of the early 1980s recession — until now.
With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression.
In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.
This includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.
The official jobless rate — 10.2 percent in October, up from 9.8 percent in September — remains lower than the early 1980s peak of 10.8 percent.
The broader rate is highest today, sometimes 20 percent, in states that had big housing bubbles, like California and Arizona, or that have large manufacturing sectors, like Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island and South Carolina.
The new benchmark is a sign of just how much damage financial crises tend to inflict. A recent book by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, two economists, found that over the last century the typical crisis had caused the jobless rate in the country where it occurred to rise for almost five years. By that standard, the jobless rate here would continue rising for two more years, through the end of 2011.
Most economists predict that the rate will in fact begin to fall next year, largely because of the federal government’s aggressive response — fiscal stimulus, interest-rate cuts and a variety of creative steps by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department. Friday’s report showed that monthly job losses continued to slow recently, though the improvement has been gradual.
At the White House Friday, President Obama signed a bill to extend unemployment benefits and a tax credit for home buyers, and said that he was looking at ways to enact more stimulus. On Wednesday, the Fed announced that it expected to leave its benchmark interest at zero for “an extended period.”
Nearly 16 million people are now unemployed and more than seven million jobs have been lost since late 2007.
Officially, the Labor Department’s broad measure of unemployment goes back only to 1994. But early this year, with the help of economists at the department, The New York Times created a version that estimates it going back to 1970. If such a measure were available for the Depression, it probably would have exceeded 30 percent.
Compared with the early 1980s, a smaller share of workers today are officially unemployed and a smaller share are considered discouraged workers.
But there are many more people who would like to be working full time and have been able to find only part-time work, according to the government’s monthly survey of workers. The rapid increase in their ranks and in the officially unemployed has caused the rate to rise much faster in this recession than in the early 1980s. Two years ago, it was only 8.2 percent.
One of the more striking aspects of the Great Recession is that most of its impact has fallen on a relatively narrow group of workers. This is evident primarily in two ways.
First, the number of people who have experienced any unemployment is surprisingly low, given the severity of the recession. The pace of layoffs has increased, but the peak layoff rate this year was the same as it was during the 2001 recession, which was a fairly mild downturn. The main reason that the unemployment rate has soared is the hiring rate has plummeted.
So fewer workers than might be expected have lost their jobs. But those without work are paying a steep price, because finding a new job is extremely difficult.
Second, wages have continued to rise for most people who still have jobs. The average hourly wage for rank-and-file workers, who make up about four-fifths of the work force, actually accelerated in October, according to the new report.
Even though some companies have cut the pay of workers, the average hourly wage has still risen 1.5 to 2.5 percent over the last year, depending on which government survey is examined. Average weekly pay has risen less — zero to 1 percent — because hours have been cut. But average prices have fallen. Altogether, the typical worker has received a 1 to 2 percent inflation-adjusted raise over the last year.
In the other two severe recessions in recent decades, workers with jobs fared considerably worse. At the same point in the mid-1970s downturn, real weekly pay had fallen 7 percent; in the early 1980s recession, it had fallen 4 percent.
It is a strange combination: workers who still have a job are doing better than in other deep recessions, but the unemployment and underemployment have risen to their highest level since the Depression.
THAT'S liberal bias? Economists? Labor Dept? Loads of data?
And you have nothing but ridicule again...google Dear Leader indeed.
Look, if you insist on refusing to belief that a biased story can be put next an unbiased one, then the bias is entire in your own perception--after all, that's what you keep coming back with, that you can see it--it's just unreasonable to ask you to point it out.
If you're going to view the world through liberal-colored glasses, then you're going to see liberals everywhere you look. Have you looked online about that? I hear you can sprinkle Conservative urine around the perimeter to repel them.
If it's a false premise, as you keep repeating, then construct a cogent argument why. So far, it's a clear vision that only you can see, clothes invisible to all but the Emperor.
This just goes in circles. The Emperor has nothing on.
Now, although you completely ignore the above HEADLINE STORY--here's the one you chose:
U.S. Unemployment Rate Hits 10.2%, Highest in 26 Years
By PETER S. GOODMAN
Javier C. Hernandez contributed reporting.
Published: November 6, 2009
As the unemployment rate surged to 10.2 percent in October, reaching double digits for the first time in 26 years, it suddenly seemed possible that the nation might yet confront the worst joblessness since the Great Depression.
In the six decades since the government began compiling such data, the highest level of unemployment came at the end of 1982, when it hit 10.8 percent. Despite the widespread assumption that the recession has already ended, and even as the economy has resumed growing, the government’s latest snapshot of the labor market released Friday testified to the uncomfortable truth that expansion had yet to translate into jobs.
“The guy on the street is going to ask, ‘What recovery?’ ” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The job market is still in reverse.”
The sharp rise in unemployment — which climbed from 9.8 percent in September, as the nation lost another 190,000 net jobs — intensified pressure on the Obama administration to show results from the $787 billion package of spending measures unleashed early this year to spur the economy.
On Friday, President Obama signed into law a bill that that extends both unemployment benefits and temporary tax credits for home buyers, adding that he was on the lookout for other ways to generate job growth.
Hilda Solis, the labor secretary, noted a slowdown in the pace of deterioration in arguing that better days were already on the way, while dismissing suggestions that the stimulus had proved disappointing. “I don’t think it’s a matter of things going wrong,” she said in a conference call with reporters. “We’re making a tremendous turning point here.”
But the stark reality of double-digit unemployment seemed certain to inject fresh tension into the economic policy debate, offering Republicans a prop as they assert that the administration’s spending package has failed to create jobs.
Labor unions and some Democrats have called for more spending to create jobs — a course that runs headlong into worries about swelling federal budget deficits.
In an interview this week, Richard L. Trumka, president of the nation’s largest labor union, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., urged the government to finance large-scale construction projects to put people to work. Absent that, he said, “it will probably be 2012 before there starts to be real job creation.”
Despite the headline-grabbing unemployment number, economists sifting through the details of the Labor Department’s report found several reasons to take comfort.
The pace at which jobs are disappearing continued to taper off in October. Between November 2008 and April 2009 — amid the paralyzing fear that accompanied the collapse of prominent financial institutions like Lehman Brothers — the economy shed an average of 645,000 jobs a month. Between May and July, the pace dropped to an average monthly loss of 357,000 jobs. Over the last three reports, average monthly job losses have slipped to 188,000, after factoring in upward revisions to the data for August and September.
Temporary workers increased by 44,000 in October, adding to gains in the previous two months — an apparent sign that businesses had squeezed as much production as they could out of their existing work forces and felt the need to bring in more people.
“That goes the right way,” said Dean Baker, co-director for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “That’s an encouraging sign.”
The hope is that as the economy expands, companies will use fresh profits to add to payrolls in a reach for increased sales. As workers spend their paychecks, they will create opportunities for other businesses, generating more jobs — an upward spiral.
Some experts see this unfolding now, asserting that the economy will add jobs by late winter.
“People are hurting, but if you can get past the sticker shock of the unemployment rate and look at the guts of the report, they are still very consistent with a recovery,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research and trading firm MKM Partners. “We’re getting very close to the peak unemployment rate.”
But some doubt recent trends can continue, absent another dose of government spending.
Though the economy grew at 3.5 percent annualized rate between July and September, much business activity was enhanced by special programs aimed at encouraging consumers to spend, not least the cash-for-clunkers program, which provided taxpayer-financed cash incentives to people trading in their cars.
As the effects of this and other stimulus programs fade over coming months, fundamental weakness may re-emerge, with consumers — whose spending accounts for 70 percent of overall economic activity — confronting enormous debt, the loss of wealth and fears about job security.
“We just went through an unbelievable financial catastrophe in this country and it typically takes a long time to come back,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief United States economist at MFR Inc., a market research firm in New York, who envisions the decline in jobs to continue until at least the middle of next year. He forecasts that the unemployment rate will reach 10.6 percent by the middle of next year and then perhaps climb higher.
Some worry that double-digit unemployment carries a psychological dimension that could perpetuate anxiety, prompting further hunkering down within the economy.
“It’s a benchmark,” Mr. Baker said. “It’s part of a general backdrop of economic news that does affect decisions by businesses and purchases of big-ticket items.”
Beneath the dueling interpretations of future prospects, the report left little doubt that the present remained bleak in millions of American households. The pain has fallen harder on men, among whom unemployment reached 10.7 percent in October, compared with 8.1 percent among women. The unemployment rate for African-American men reached 17.1 percent.
Unemployment reached 9.5 percent among white Americans, 13.1 percent among Hispanics and 27.6 among teenagers.
Health care, a rare bright spot, added 29,000 jobs in October. Construction and manufacturing led the way, losing 62,000 and 61,000 jobs respectively.
In Columbia, S.C., Raymond Vaughn, 43, remains unemployed a year-and-a-half after he lost his job installing windows, relying upon his fiancée’s wages from a secretarial job to pay the bills.
Back in April, he was training for a new career in medical billing through an online course he found on the Internet. But his unemployment benefits soon ran out, eliminating his $221-a-week check, and then he could no longer muster the $98 weekly payments for his course.
Last month, Mr. Vaughn thought he had a job for $13 an hour at a factory that makes flooring boards. But two weeks before he was to begin training, the company called him to revoke the offer. “They said they had a hiring freeze,” he said.
So Mr. Vaughn finds himself stuck in a drearily familiar routine: every morning, he drives to the unemployment office downtown, where crowds seem thicker than ever. He scans meager listings and sends out fresh applications. Then, he returns home, to his sagging couch and his television, where cheerful news anchors tell him that the economy is looking up.
“They say it’s supposed to be better, that’s what I see on the news,” Mr. Vaughn said. “But I sure see a lot of people down at the unemployment office. I really don’t see how the job stuff is going to change. I don’t see any jobs out there.”
Whoa---notice all those other sources than the only one you had to cherry pick out of the middle?
< Message edited by Musicmystery -- 11/7/2009 4:58:46 PM >
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RE: Take the Fox Balance/Bias Challenge! - 
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