U.S. employers added only 142,000 jobs in August, nudging the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, down from its previous posting of 6.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
At well below the “200,000 jobs added” mark, a measurement widely considered the sign of a healthy, growing economy, the August jobs report is lackluster at best, shoddy at worst.
Jobs added in the U.S.:
And here’s something interesting: The August jobs report isn’t going over well with many in the cable news crowd.
“It’s a disappointment — a big one,” CNBC’s Sarah Eisen said during an MSNBC panel discussion, referring to the BLS report.
“It is actually the worst level of job creation, in terms of the monthly number, all year long,” she continued. “This is not a good report.”
Elsewhere, the Fox Business team was unimpressed with the report.
“What happened?” Fox’s Charles Payne asked, adding later during a discussion with S&P Capital IQ managing director Mike Thompson that we’re “at the point now … where we need good news to be good news.”
The implication, of course, being that today’s report was a bit disappointing:
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Meanwhile, CNN.com was even more succinct in its reaction to August’s jobs report: “Yuck.”
The jobs report, CNN.com added, raises obvious “questions about the strength of the job market’s rebound. Many Americans already do not feel that the job market has fully recovered from the Great Recession.”
Lastly, there was the reaction from the crew at CNBC.
“It felt like we had a lot of momentum,” said CNBC’s David Faber. “And somehow it also feels though we’re repeating a pattern we’ve seen before, that every time we really feel like we have momentum, we get a number that doesn’t quite compute and/or stops that momentum.”
Now, it could be that media personalities are reacting to the fact that the economy has been a sluggish mess for more than six years. Or it could be that the nature of the 24-hour news cycle dictates that media personalities overreact to news reports and play up “doom” headlines as they compete ruthlessly for readers and viewership.
