News Outlets Gets Job Numbers Backwards

KTLA's website is typical in reporting in a larger font that only seventy-eight thousand jobs were added in May, and in a smaller font that the unemployment rate is down to 5.1%. As the unemployment rate slips, it simply must get harder and harder to keep the job creation numbers up. This seems to go unmentioned no matter where I see or hear this news reported. Part of the problem is that no one knows where structural unemployment lay, and so we can't tell whether job creation slips because were are approaching structural unemployment, or because of poor economic performance. Putting the news in the organization "job creation low" and "unemployment rate very low" ends up being at the very least a dubious misreading. Try this headline: "Unemployment lowest since September 2001, job creation slows."