XPost: ucb.math, alt.society.civil-liberty, ca.environment
XPost: alt.mountain-bike

Many people had high hopes for the December jobs report with
economists’ forecasting job gains of around 200,000. The report,
which was released Jan. 10, showed only 74,000 jobs added in
December.

That was bad news, especially after 241,000 jobs were added in
November. At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported that the unemployment rate fell from 7 percent, to 6.7
percent, primarily because of workforce dropouts.

The administration and two out of three broadcast networks
blamed weather for the disappointing report, but both liberal
and conservative economists dismissed this explanation.

(video after break)

Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez told CNBC’s “Squawk on the
Street” that “weather is undeniably a factor,” on Jan. 10. That
evening, CBS “Evening News” and NBC “Nightly News” parroted this
explanation. However, economists that spoke with the MRC’s
Business and Media Institute dismissed the notion.

“Evening News,” Senior Business Correspondent Anthony Mason
called bad weather “a big factor in December hiring,” quoting an
unnamed economist who said “Job growth got snowed in.” NBC’s
“Nightly News” also promoted the weather’s impact on jobs data,
with anchor Brian Williams saying “the unusual cold weather may
have been a factor in this.”

ABC’s “World News” spent only 22 seconds on the jobs report
mentioning both the job gains and the change in unemployment
rate, but failed to mention the amount of workers leaving the
workforce. Weather was not mentioned by “World News.”

Each of these segments was broadcast after Perez appeared on
CNBC and co-host Carl Quintanilla asked “How much of this had
something to do with the weather?”

He responded, “Oh, I think the weather is a factor,” before
delivering an anecdote about his own experience with the weather
over the holidays. He concluded “weather is undeniably a factor.”

This claim that weather caused the weak jobs data was disputed
by liberal and conservative economists. Dean Baker, co-director
of left-wing Center for Economic and Policy Research, told BMI
he would “totally dismiss” the weather explanation and pointed
out that the BLS adjusts their data for seasonal variations.

James Sherk, the senior policy analyst in labor economics at the
conservative Heritage Foundation, also took issue with the
weather explanation. He called it “grasping for an explanation”
when he spoke with BMI.

During the week of Dec. 8, when the BLS surveyed to gather the
employment data, national temperatures were 5.5 degrees below
the normal December temperature. But according to Business
Insider, Brian Jones, senior economist for the financial
analysis firm Societe Generale, said that “precipitation has a
much bigger impact on nonfarm payrolls than temperature.” Jones
found that “conditions were unusually dry over much of the
continental U.S. during that period.”

In addition to CBS and NBC, many other news outlets were playing
the blame game too. The Wall Street Journal’s Kathleen Madigan
urged readers to “Blame Mother Nature,” saying “273,000 people
couldn’t get to work because of bad weather in December.” The
New York Times’ Nelson D. Schwartz claimed that “wintry weather,
however, may have exaggerated the weakness” of the jobs market.

Some took other tactics to try to explain away the disappointing
report. Mark Zandi of Moody Analytics, argued on “Squawk Box”
that they would be revised upwards in later months, as is common
with outlying data. Zandi told CNBC viewers that “Next month
this will be – we’re gonna get the benchmark revisions and
they’ll be revised up and away.”

Sherk was not so confident. While he acknowledged that the
December data “may be an outlier,” he told BMI, “I highly doubt
you will see revisions of that magnitude.”


http://newsbusters.org/blogs/sean-long/2014/01/14/nbc-cbs-blame- weak-jobs-report-weather-economists-disagree
 

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