I was driving to cover a football game last night, and hit the Scan button to find a radio station. NPR appeared, so I stopped the scan to listen to what the NPR Left is talking about. They were discussing the surprising announcement by the feds that the unemployment rate suddenly and dramatically dropped from 8.2 to 7.8 percent.
The host repeatedly said that there's no way the Department of Labor Statistics could or would ever risk their reputation by "cooking the books" to get a favorable number for President Obama coincidentally a month before the election. She brought in two "journalists", Dana Milbank and David Brooks, to amplify her message.
Even listening to them ramble on about the integrity of the "nonpartisan" bureaucrats in Washington who are "immune" from pressure from the White House to favor their president by posting bogus statistics, I found myself even more suspicious.
Thou protesteth too much, methinks. The group came off to my ear as desperate. They're worried that Obama's poor debate performance has caused many voters to abandon their beloved president to begin seriously considering giving Mitt Romney a try. David Brooks is the default choice by the left-wing media complex as the token Conservative, but I don't know whether he's ever been a conservative - he just plays one at the Times for the job, exposure, and praise he gets from the Left for being some sort of rare "reasonable" conservative voice.
The economy added only about 114,000 jobs last month, and somehow the unemployment rate magically dropped 3 percent? Nobody with a brain would call that logical. As far as I can tell, they switched to something called a "Household Survey" to come up with the new rate. It sounds like they changed the definition of unemployed and stretched the rules to begin counting folks who make a few bucks here and there picking up odd jobs as employed.
Obama needed this number desperately because he needed to change the subject. It doesn't require some kind of cynical partisanship to suspect that the president asked Hilda Solis for help, and she delivered. Now he finally has shut Romney up about the 30-some straight months of unemployment over 8 percent. Now instead of continuing to talk about his thrashing in the debate, he's got the media working hard to cover for him with this new manufactured unemployment statistic.
Just a postscript about NPR. Suppose you were part of a truly non-partisan media organization that only cared about uncovering and reporting the truth. When this sudden and inexplicable drop in the unemployment rate was announced, what would be your first priority? Would it be to get busy talking to the folks that compile those statistics, study the raw numbers and methodologies that went into them, and reporting the truth of whatever you find to the public? Or would it be to immediately go on air to defend the agency and the president, and reassure the public that there's absolutely no possibility that they've been playing hanky-panky with the numbers to try to help re-elect their president?
We know which path NPR chose.
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