Jim,

>Unemployment has been a story for months now. I'd have thought that any dents would have been the subject of BIG NEWS.

I guess news organizations could set up their own system of tracking jobs and unemployment if they don't want to believe the official government numbers. (Those government numbers are always revised a few months later, BTW, as more accurate data or tardy reports are added to the mix, so it's not an easy task.)

Many companies don't make public their hiring practices or statistics, so how would the media know that things were improving if not from the official government reporting mechanisms that they have been relying on and reporting on for years?

I know it must be hard for some to accept that over 700,000 new jobs have been added since August last year, but those are the numbers (and no, that number is not being reported as consistently as the "2+ million jobs lost" phrase that is repeated so often).

Why is the economic news so suspect when it is good news? I agree that the economy has a long way to go, but I'm seeing and hearing about lots of new development work going on and recent economic indicators are up consistently this year.

I also laugh when I hear people use the argument that unemployement numbers can't be as low as they seem because they don't count those whose unemployment checks have run out. That has ALWAYS been the standard, and the low unemployment percentage was being called "low" when it was at this level during the prior administration. You don't hear 5.6 or 5.7 being called "low" today, do you?

Some people just have to nit-pick away the good news to try to make the economy seem worse than it is -- for politcal purposes, of course.