Yesterday, while doing my cardio, I caught the “news” on CNN. And once again, they spun the headlines to favor their friends in the White House. Reporting the latest unemployment numbers showing tepid job growth, they helpfully furnished us with a chart similar to the one below comparing job growth under the incumbent to that under his predecessor.
Fortunately, when I did a google search for the chart, a blogger who linked it had the same reaction to the chart most of us did when first we saw it on our left-of-center friend’s Facebook pages*: “This chart provides us with only a year of the Bush Administration’s performance.”
It is, he added, “a little unfair to Mr. Bush to snag the worst of his numbers and compare to the rosiest of the Obama numbers“, providing then a more complete picture of job growth over the past decade:
You’d think that if the purpose of a news agency were to compare two politicians, they’d give us this more complete picture rather than the selective chart at the top of this post. It does seem that media outlets like CNN want to define George W. Bush’s economic record by his last year in office rather than the full eight years — and without indicating that for his last two years in office, that Republican shared power with a Democratic Congress.
*Do recall they sourced the chart either to the White House or the Democratic National Committee.
The addition of another chart doesn’t really make Bush look any better or Obama look any worse in my opinion. The first chart shows Obama taking office during the ‘trough’ of job losses (the second chart seems to concur) followed by sharply falling job losses leading to growth (again, second graph concurs, though with some odd-looking extra spikes that make me suspicious of its accuracy), but what the second graph really adds here is that current job growth under Obama and the post-Bush tax cut job growth are hardly miles apart.
Also, the second graph puts into stronger focus the sharp, V-shaped pattern of job losses. The losses leave about as quickly as they appear, making me more sceptical of the ‘Obama slowed the recovery’ rhetoric. How much faster could it have been? Completely vertical? Finally, contrast the other recession on the graph. Smaller recession, Republican President and Congress, prescription: tax cuts, result: slow, uncertain recovery over the course of about two years.
So yes, in this case I am a big fan of extra context. It made the reality of job growth in the United States much clearer.
What I dislike about any of these charts is that I do not know and can not know whether they apply consistent measurement standards across the spectrum presented.
The Obama government keeps altering how unemployment is calculated and what constitutes job growth.
When the “official” numbers are subject to statistical manipulation, it is only “fair” that the entire chart be based on the same manipulation.