Hal Morris, writing on his GrumpyEditor.com blog, wants to know why no one apparently questioned the veracity of the most recent unemployment data.
Morris writes, “Figures also were associated with March employment in the service-providing sector, the leisure and hospitality category, manufacturing (along with sub-categories), mining and local government, among others.
“The news release also pinpointed $22.87 as the ‘average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls’ in March.
“(Keep in mind there were about 26 million firms in the latest U.S. Census Bureau count.)
“All these figures, and others for March, were assembled before the clock struck midnight, ushering in April.
“Eyebrow-raising editors, usually suspicious of figures — from attendance at baseball games to precipitation amounts from the Weather Service — were mum on the instant tabulations that made front pages in many newspapers around the country and led-off radio and television news on April 1.”
Read more here.
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Putting aside the fact that this grumpy editor seems to have failed to provide a main sentence, something 'eyebrow-raising' word-workers employ to give rushed readers the story's gist, he has committed an error that would leave any editor far from mum: writing about something he obviously doesn't understand in the slightest.
Assuming that--and we can only extrapolate here because his point is not explicitly made with what he might call a nut 'graph--the grumpy editors thinks it strange the government can complete it's calculations in such a short span, we then must sigh, for would you not expect someone with his professed critical eye to have asked how the government calculates employment figures? Had the commentator done his research, he would have learned that federal agents are not frantically running from door to door on the eve of the payroll release to calculate who is or isn't unemployed. They get that done on the 12 of every month and release the data 3 Friday's later. I found that out with a quick glance at a government website: http://www.bls.gov/ces/cesfaq.htm#scope1