The Bureau of Labor Statistics released February’s jobs numbers on Friday showing that the unemployment rate ticked down to 5.5%, the lowest rate the country has seen since May 2008, months before the financial crisis that rocked the American economy and led to huge job losses. Overall, the economy added 295,000 new jobs in the month, far more than expectations from experts who estimated that the bitter cold weather in the Northeast would cause a slowdown in job creation.
February’s report marks the 12th straight month that we’ve seen 200,000 or more jobs added, the first time that has occurred since 1984. This is also the 53rd consecutive month of positive job growth and 58th straight month of private sector growth. We haven’t seen sustained total job growth like this since 1939 and the private sector has never seen growth go on this long. Since the unemployment rate hit a high of 10.0% in October 2009, less than eight months into President Obama’s tenure in the White House, it has nearly been cut in half down to its current level of 5.5%. Under any normal analysis, that would be considered a rousing success.
Of course, not everyone is ecstatic over the robust job growth and plummeting unemployment rate. Fox News, whose entire business model these days is based on Obama being an abject failure, cannot possibly let their bubble-dwelling audience know about good news that occurs under the President’s watch. On Friday morning, shortly after the BLS released the report, you would have no idea that this was a major news story if you were on Fox News’ website. While CNN and MSNBC both listed it as a top story on their sites and talked about at length on their morning shows, Fox News pushed the story to a small sidebar on its main page and barely mentioned anything about the report in the morning.
Below are screengrabs from the three websites, all taken at 9:15 ET Friday morning. First, Fox News:
Next, MSNBC. The network listed it as their second top story Friday morning.
Meanwhile, CNN listed the jobs report as its top story.
Fox News will likely get around to talking about the economy and the plummeting unemployment rate and sustained job growth. However, they need to get their talking points and overriding narrative in order first. Also, they want to see the response from Republican leaders in Washington, conservative websites/blogs and right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. After aggregating all of those takes, they’ll let their big dogs in primetime give the official Fox News spin about how Obama’s economy is awful, he is killing the country and Obamacare is still the biggest job-killer in the nation’s history.
Or, they’ll just ignore it and pretend that nothing positive is happening in this country. Either or works fine for their audience.
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