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Finding the Lead Lining

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Topic: Media
Content Type: Opinion
Keywords: COVID, unemployment, media bias, economic reporting, coronavirus

Finding the Lead Lining

Every major outlet reported the 4-week COVID unemployment total instead of noting that weekly claims had declined from their peak.

This morning, prior to the announcement of last week's initial unemployment claims, I was curious whether they'd be higher or lower than last week. Lower would be good news, obviously, and higher bad news. So, when I saw they were slightly lower, I thought, well that's good, at least things have stopped getting drastically worse.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the headline '22 Million Workers File for Unemployment Benefits in Just 4 Weeks'. I thought, 'That's a negative way to put it.'

Then, I did a quick survey of other outlets, and they all report the four week total! It seems quite odd to me that every outlet reports the monthly total over the weekly total, and not a single one of them notes that this is down from last week's peak.