Unemployment figures came out last week from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing a 9.8% unemployment rate. Yet many conservative publications headlined that the jobless rate is actually 17%. How did they come up with this figure? Well, they included people with part-time jobs and other debatable stats to arrive at 17%. You can see their methodology here. The idea that unemployment is actually higher than the reported rate is not a new concept. Every single time that unemployment figures come out, and for as long as they have come out, there has always been a way to calculate it so that the unemployment figure is higher than reported. So it is not a new calculus.
What is new though is how the Right utilizes the reconstituted figure and publishes this as the actual unemployment rate when Obama is the president (see Fox News, Greta Van Susteren, and The Washington Times example images above). Using the inflated and recalculated unemployment figure was never a practice by the Right when George Bush was in power. Why now? I quote Sun Myung Moon (yes, that Moon of Unification Church fame), founder and owner of the Right wing newspaper The Washington Times, who said, "That is why Father has been combining and organizing scholars from all over the world, and also newspaper organizations, in order to make propaganda."
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