There's a reason why bloggers refer to NPR as "Nice Polite Republicans." Once the Republicans successfully pulled the bulk of federal funding so they has to make it up from corporate contributions, they began bending over backwards to please their funders. Eric Boehlert critiques NPR in his latest edition of PressRun:
On Friday, the Labor Department announced that as the economy emerges from the pandemic, 210,000 jobs were added in November, fewer than what analysts had expected. NPR immediately pounced on Twitter: “November hiring was a bust, with only 210,000 jobs created — and those numbers came in even before omicron was identified.”
NPR’s report was clear: Hiring was in the ditch and it was likely to get much worse with an “even more worrisome coronavirus variant” looming. (For the record, scientists don’t yet know if the Omicron variant will be worse than the Delta variant.) The political implications for the Biden White House were obvious, as well. The Beltway press for months has been stressing that the economy, and especially inflation, was a major political problem for Biden, and constantly listed it as one of his pressing “crises.” According to NPR on Friday, that crisis just got worse because the jobs report — 210,000 new positions — was an unequivocal “bust.”
What’s odd is how NPR previously covered similar jobs announcements under Trump. Back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy was “revved up” because 225,000 jobs had been created. The year before that, an NPR headline read, “Job Market Surges As Employers Add 266,000 Jobs In November.” NPR made sure to include an excited quote from the White House in the third paragraph of that report: “It's a tremendous report. Obviously, it's something to be very happy about.”
Both of those recent cases during the Trump years make it sound like adding between 200,000 and 300,000 jobs in a month is a very good thing. But under Biden it’s a “bust” because “just 210,000 jobs” were created.
Not to mention that Biden's job numbers have been consistently revised upwards. You'd think a news organization would remember that.
