You can’t put everything in the headline, but …
“People only read the headlines,” I’ve been told countless times over the years by critics who believe some crucial fact has been omitted from some particular headline that all those ignoramuses need to know.
Take a few headlines from this morning (some may change as the day goes on):
“U.S. unemployment rate falls to 9.7% as employers add 431,000 jobs: Labor Department” — NY Daily News
“Unemployment drops in May” — Christian Science Monitor
“Unemployment Rate in May Drops to 9.7%” — CBS News
“Economy adds 431K jobs but few in private sector” — Associated Press
“Hiring weak in May except for Census workers, U.S. says” — Wall Street Journal
Talk about good news/bad news takes on the news. Most got around to telling that private sector hiring was weak and most of the jobs added were temporary Census jobs. The people on Wall Street were reading more than the headlines as the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a dive on the joblessness news.
I wonder how many traders read another story about those Census jobs a couple of days ago.
Writing in the New York Post, John Crudele tells of Census workers being paid mileage to drive to a training sight as well as being paid $17 an hour during the commute.
But the best part was this: “A couple weeks ago I found out that Census was repeatedly hiring and firing workers without any apparent reason. I questioned if this was being done to artificially boost the nation's employment figures since the Labor Dept. considers it a new job created whenever someone is hired to work as little as one hour in a month.”
Was the agency inflating jobs to make the economy look better for the boss?
Crudele found several people who had been hired and fired three and four times in a short period. Presumably each time counted as a new hire.
The headline was: “Census workers share their horror stories.”
In a follow-up Thursday, Crudele’s piece was headlined: “My dust-up with the director of the US Census.”
The director denied any such multiple hirings and firings, apparently without so much as asking anyone whether it might have happened. He just read the headline.
