"JOBS UP, UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN?" MORE FOX UP-IS-DOWNISM

I meant to post on this before, but kept forgetting. Tuning in to Fox News the other morning (by default -- the hotel didn't have MSNBC, and CNN was doing a very long story on something non-political) at a very early hour I heard this headline: "Jobs up, unemployment down." THIS is the real story they were covering up with their misleading headline.

Employers added 56,000 to payrolls last month compared with a revised loss of 8,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department reported. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com were looking for 100,000 new jobs. The decline in September was the first drop in payrolls in more than two years.

The unemployment rate edged down to 5 percent from 5.1 percent in September, in part because a large number of people weren't counted as part of the labor force after the storms.

Kathleen Utgoff, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said in a statement that while September's job losses were Katrina-related, the October weakness was due to softness in the labor market outside the storm-affected regions.
...
Still, employees apparently aren't keeping up with inflation. A jump in gasoline prices has lifted the overall Consumer Price Index, the government's key inflation index, up 4.7 percent over the 12 months ending in September.

Fox might well be called GOP News. It's pure pro-administration spin, and more than a significant factor in Bush's continued support by a third of the nation.

Tags: Fox News, economy, inflation, unemployment