Media Matters vs. Fox News

Yesterday, a friend on Facebook linked to a Media Matters for America critique of a Fox News chart supposing to show “Job Loss By Quarter.” Normally I brush off Media Matters, because while they often have very solid analysis, I also feel they often do more attacking AGAINST conservative media than analysis of, or “fighting back against,” conservative media.

However, the analysis by MM’s Jocelyn Fong interested me, particularly since she hit the chart from multiple angles and even gave Fox the benefit of the doubt a couple of times. This latter part is not something I often see when I go to MM. Below is the chart, with some of Fong’s analysis:

The chart claims to show “Job loss by quarter.” But it doesn’t. (We lost 15 million jobs in the second quarter of 2010!?? Surely, that would have been catastrophic news.) What this defective chart actually displays is the number of unemployed during four random quarters over the past two-and-a-half years.

And later:

Notice on Fox’s chart that the first interval on the horizontal axis, from December ’07 to September ’08 represents 9 months. The second interval, between September ’08 and March ’09, represents 6 months. And the third interval, from March ’09 to June ’10,  represents 15 months, almost all of Obama’s term so far. So the third interval should be two-and-a-half times as long as the second. But in Fox’s chart, it’s shorter!

The effect of this is to flatten out the steep rise in the number of unemployed between September ’08 and March ’09 (before Obama’s policies started taking effect) and to suggest that the increases in unemployment later during Obama’s term were more dramatic than they actually were. To get the line straight, Fox also manipulated the scale of the vertical axis.

I decided to do some background checking. I called the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and was led to their June 04, 2010 report of May’s unemployment numbers, which said 15.0 million people were unemployed during May. (The BLS employee I spoke to said the 15 million was slightly rounded up from the actual numbers.) So far, it looks like Fox was not actively misleading with information on the chart- merely, as Fong noted initially, misnaming the chart and skewing its intervals. Bad, but not dishonest.

However, I was still unsatisfied, and called Chris Harris at MM, who followed up with Fong on my behalf (their research people don’t take calls directly, according to the operator). My question is in bold, with her answer following:

Is it accurate to say these are the number of jobs lost at these points during the recession?

Not quite. The number of unemployed and “jobs lost” are not the same thing. When the recession started in December 2007, there were around 7.7 million people unemployed, according to the BLS Current Population Survey data. If you go back a couple of years, to December 2004, long before the recession began, there were 7.9 million people unemployed. Since there are always several million people unemployed at any given point, it’s misleading to say that 15 million have “lost jobs” as of May 2010. It’s even more misleading to omit any information from the period between March ’09 and June ’10, during which the unemployment level trend shifted significantly from increasingly steeply to essentially leveling out. The number of unemployed is now 639,000 lower than when it peaked in October 2009. You have to wonder why Fox chose those four specific points to include in the chart. And it’s also misleading for Fox to manipulate the scale of their chart in a way that understates the unemployment increases in late 2008 and early 2009 and exaggerates unemployment increases during the remainder of Obama’s term.

In retrospect, I realize my question was not phrased well. Not only did I forget that there is always unemployment, even in good times, but I also should have asked- as Fong noted- about the number of unemployed as opposed to jobs lost. However, I think Fong’s response shows that while Fox did skew the scale and misname the chart, there was no intent to mislead on what the actual information.

In the end, I think Fong was a bit overzealous in her analysis, because she obviously has talent, but also clearly was going out of her way to hammer Fox. She notes the following in her closing:

And again, when you use Fox’s data points like this, with no information about the period between March ’09 and June ’10, you miss the fact that the number of unemployed has essentially stopped rising since the Fall of 2009.

While this is entirely accurate, it also obscures that a lot of the hiring has been census workers, and that Fox wasn’t attempting, by Fong’s own statements, to show when and where employment stopped falling. Whether or not they should have is a debate for a different day- Fox was merely showing the unemployment rate at semi-random quarters (two of the quarters were the start of the recession and the current month, hence why they were semi-random data points) throughout the recession, as Fong herself noted. Again:

What this defective chart actually displays is the number of unemployed during four random quarters over the past two-and-a-half years.

It is overstepping of the analysis like this that causes me to sometimes brush off Media Matters. They do a lot of good work, but why spend so much time and effort on tearing apart a single Fox chart, when discrediting this particular chart could have been done with the above quote and a couple of their own charts? This is why they appear to some to be as much a tool of the Democratic Party as they likely believe Fox News to be of the Republican Party.

Update: Media Matters has an update noting Fox has changed the name of the chart to reflect more accurately upon the numbers.