The Miami Herald headline of an AP story reads, "Weekly jobless claims fall sharply," and the lead of the story recites figures from the Labor Department showing that new unemployment claims "plunged" by 24,000 claims, from 368,000 to 344,000. The article's next two paragraphs tout this decline as greater (by 7,000) than predicted by some economists and so forth.
Buried in the middle of the story, however, are these figures from the same report: The number of unemployed rose by 106,000, to 3.2 million people. Unemployed, it should be noted, is defined as persons actively seeking employment. So, while the new unemployment claims "plunged" by 24,000, the number of actual unemployed "rose" by four times that much.
Are there insane persons in the basements of AP and this newspaper, who simply choose what verbs to use from a random list, and how to cant a story, or is this recasting of data by design?
You decide.
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