Is This Incompetence? Or is The Telegraph & AP dishonest?

The President and Publisher of The Telegraph and his staff appear to be completely confused with the job numbers for last month. As we all know they came out last Friday, June 1, 2012, of course they were too late for Friday’s The Telegraph.  But on Saturday the games began. We would think from their previous conduct the panic and confusion was over how they were going to cover this up.

It appears that in order to cover the true figures and help alleviate the confusion, the Executive Editor Sherrie Marshall decided to conjure up something. At any rate on June 2, 2012, there it was. An article titled: “Jobless rate now a leading political indicator” the article was supposedly from AP and over the name of Jim Kuhnhenn. We are told “…that the unemployment rate did not change from April’s 8.1 percent.”

We do not know who put this article together, however unless it is corrected we think we are safe in calling this deliberately dishonesty.

On this same day on The Telegraph business page, Business Page Editor Harold Goodridge for whatever reason managed to get it right.  In an AP report titled “Bad jobs report pushes Dow down 275 points”. We are told “American employers added just 69,000 jobs in May, the fewest in a year, and the unemployment rate increased to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent.”  

We do not know what happened but the story changed again overnight. Maybe the President and Publisher George McCanless took the Business Page Editor Harold Goodridge to the wood shed.

On Sunday morning, June 3, 2012, the Business Page Editor in a three day old report by Don Lee of Tribune Washington Bureau (Owned by McClatchy Newspapers) tells us in an article titled “Jobless data stirs up anxiety for May report”.  that “New unemployment claims jumped unexpectedly last week, indicating a pickup in layoffs, a worrisome sign ahead of Friday’s jobs report for May.” The Friday they are talking about has been history for two days!

 When you go to the article notice the ending of the article on page 1D and the heading on the jump page, 2D, is this confusion or what? Did you find the birds? 

The article goes on to tell us the things we would expect from an honest newspaper on Thursday of last week, such as:

“Growth in GDP, the nation’s total output of goods and services, was revised to an annualized rate of 1.9 percent from the 2.2 percent pace estimated a month ago.”
“Many analysts are expecting mediocre growth of about 2.5 percent this year, which doesn’t bode well for the job market.”

The Labor Department’s report on weekly unemployment claims showed first-time filings rose to 383,000 for the week that ended Saturday.”

 “The rise in jobless claims was consistent with a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private out placement firm, that showed an acceleration of layoff announcements last month by employers. Challenger said Thursday that businesses in May announced plans to cut 61,000 workers from their payrolls, up to 53 percent from April and 67 percent higher than May 2011.”

As usual they ignore relevant reasons and blame it on the weather. 


We don't think we should be surprised. As can be seen from Bill Knowles and wearepolitics.com this is not something which arose over night. There is a history here. We have to ask why The telegraph hasn't covered this type of conduct in the past. From our observations, The Telegraph has been more interested in covering up this type of conduct than exposing it, i.e., the "In The pocket" (The Telegraph - April 4, 201) and the "70,000 reasons". (wearepolitics.com - April 4, 2012).  As for Editorial Page Editor Charles E. Richardson's comments (June 3, 2012) about "...the high ethics of journalism." and "If those ethics are not preserved there will be no one to watch over and expose the abuses of 'Big Brother' and the 'Brave New World' won't be a place to raise children' We had to laugh. It has been a long time since we have seen any "ethics of Journalism" at The Telegraph. 


Charles E. Richardson is the Editorial Page Editor of The Macon Telegraph which is owned by McClatchy Newspapers and we can see from the following video what their out look on child rearing seems to be. There is more this is not the only video.  

The drop out rate in the Bibb County School system is 
approximately 50 percent. We will leave it to you to decide if The 
method espoused by the McClatchy owned newspaper, The 
Telegraph, and their editorial page editor will reduce it.  
There can be no doubt The Telegraph's Visiting Member Kenny 
Burgamy is more than willing to defend his co-hart's methods. 

After seeing this we can say: “I can see clearly now”.

Have a good day.