Published September 6, 2024

As I nurse myself back to health and try to restore my sleep cycle to merely bad from alarmingly bad, I spend a lot of time sleeping or waiting to fall asleep. On occasion, I check in on the world. It’s often that I don’t like what I see.

Business reporting has some of the most troubling practices I have seen since I started paying close attention, especially during almost a decade of editing hard news. But I noticed it long before, and I still see it. Let us look at the top of today’s jobs report story by one of the major papers.

Employers added 142,000 jobs in August. Good, right? Nooooo. It continues a cooling trend, one that has stoked fears.

The unemployment rate dropped to 4.2 percent. That’s good, right? Well, whatever. We had to mention it, but not in the first paragraph or the headline.

Economists had predicted 161,000 job gains, a boost from July’s 114,000. Wait, isn’t the actual figure released today (142,000) a boost from July’s 114,000? Well, yeah, but it’s not as high as economists had expected.

But it’s still a boost from July, right? Well, yeah. But, but.

So the fear-stoking cooling continued when … jobs added went up? Just not as much as the experts had forecast?

Well, it’s complicated, Carly. It’s economics. It’s a complex amalgam of fears and trends and predictions and cooling and stuff.

The headline, for what it’s worth, said:

Employers added 142,000 jobs in August, as labor market cools

You can use “as” in headlines to shoehorn in a lot of shadiness and continue stoking fears.

Featured image by peshkov via iStock