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Did Bad Economic Reporting Doom Harris?
{Snip}
But it gets worse. The media decided that they had to push the theme of the bad economy even when they had to invent stories. The New York Times had a major July 4th weekend piece telling us that some people are doing well, while less well-off workers are falling behind. To make the latter point it chose to profile a low-paid worker, who it acknowledged was atypical, in that her pay had fallen well behind inflation. Why would the paper choose to highlight the experience of a low-paid worker, that it knows is atypical, to exemplify the situation of the larger group of low-paid workers?
To take another example from the NYT, columnist Peter Coy (generally a very good columnist), headlined a column “why can’t college grads find jobs?” In fact, unemployment among recent grads is near a 20-year low. The grain of truth in the piece is that the small share of recent grads who are unemployed (around 4.0 percent) are taking longer than usual to find new jobs. As a great example of how totally wrongheaded views permeate outward from the elite news outlets, the next week the Washington Post pushed the same line about unemployment among recent college grads.
For another example of a totally invented catastrophe, in the summer of 2022 the Washington Post discovered that a record number of people were working two full-time jobs. If they done their homework, they would have noticed that it was not a record as a share of the workforce. That record was set in July of 2000, which was the very peak of the late 1990s economic boom, usually thought to be the best year economically since the 1960s boom. Since less than 0.3 percent of the workforce fell into this category, it should have occurred to the paper that this was not a good measure of economic pain. This story was picked up the following week by Marketplace radio.
To take another example from the NYT, columnist Peter Coy (generally a very good columnist), headlined a column “why can’t college grads find jobs?” In fact, unemployment among recent grads is near a 20-year low. The grain of truth in the piece is that the small share of recent grads who are unemployed (around 4.0 percent) are taking longer than usual to find new jobs. As a great example of how totally wrongheaded views permeate outward from the elite news outlets, the next week the Washington Post pushed the same line about unemployment among recent college grads.
For another example of a totally invented catastrophe, in the summer of 2022 the Washington Post discovered that a record number of people were working two full-time jobs. If they done their homework, they would have noticed that it was not a record as a share of the workforce. That record was set in July of 2000, which was the very peak of the late 1990s economic boom, usually thought to be the best year economically since the 1960s boom. Since less than 0.3 percent of the workforce fell into this category, it should have occurred to the paper that this was not a good measure of economic pain. This story was picked up the following week by Marketplace radio.
https://cepr.net/did-bad-economic-reporting-doom-harris/
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