Submitter Chastises Reporting in Concise Letter to the Editor
The following letter to the editor from today’s Northwest Herald is was published here with the author’s permission:
To the Editor:
If employment in the U.S. dropped by 2 percent, it would be considered an unmitigated economic disaster.
And if the government issued a glowing report on the economy while employment dropped 2 percent, the press would have a field day.
And rightfully so.
Steve Willson
This may not be the news we want to hear, but it’s the real story, and I’m appalled the Herald would purposely leave out the single most important economic indicator about the health of the local economy.
It goes beyond bad reporting to downright lying by omission.
Come on, Northwest Herald: If you want the public to respect you, then report the relevant and important facts about what’s going on in McHenry County.
Steve Willson
Lakewood
Yup.
Here’s what the Herald’s masthead should be: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/front-page-fake-news-mainstream-newspaper-title-headline-flat-design-illustration-tag-word-cloud-lorem-ipsum-85355996.jpg
The NWH – The CNN of local newspapers.
Same thing could be said about this bias blog.
Or they (NWH) have no one that can add or subtract!
“It goes beyond bad reporting to downright lying by omission”
Illinois is going down the sewer, there is no hope, no plan, just keep taxing.
I frankly think this piece is hilarious. Instead of manufacturing, agribusiness, etc., the author has decided two schmo’s nursing a beer at a sports bar, is a barometer of economic vitality in McHenry County.
Or should I switch to decaf?
Nob is a complete idiot. This is a blog. This is whatever Cal wants to talk about. Period. He doesn’t MAKE SHIT UP like CNN and NWH!
Steve, source link please. And your further commentary please. John
Wow Steve really is a “glass 2.2% empty” kind of guy, isn’t he?
John, in my original letter I actually included the source as follows: (Source: IDES.illlinois.gov). The Herald changed the language.
It took me about five minutes to find the data. I started with a Google search “total employment Illinois”. I got listings for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a couple of nongovernmental sites, and the Illinois Department of Employment Security. Checking the two governmental sites, I found county level data on the IDES site very quickly.
For some reason, this particular article in the blog seems to have truncated my letter, and so what’s left doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Below is the full letter:
If employment in the U.S. dropped by 2%, it would be considered an
unmitigated economic disaster. And if the Federal government issued a
glowing report on the economy while employment dropped 2%, the press
would have a field day. And rightfully so.
But on January 16, 2018, the Northwest Herald ran a glowing story about
the economic rebound in McHenry County and somehow failed to mention
that in the preceding twelve months private employment dropped 2.2%.
(Source: IDES.illlinois.gov) This is in stark contrast to the nation’s
economy, which grew jobs 1.1% during the same period.
This may not be the news we want to hear, but it’s the real story, and
I’m appalled the Herald would purposely leave out the single most
important economic indicator about the health of the local economy. It
goes beyond bad reporting to downright lying by omission.
Come on, Northwest Herald: If you want the public to respect you, then
report the relevant and important facts about what’s going on in McHenry
County!
John Pletz:
If you want more detail, when I got to the IDES site, I didn’t know exactly where I’d find the data, so I nosed around a little bit until I found what I needed. At the top are several options and when I hovered the mouse over “Tools and Resources”, I found Statistics. That looked promising so I clicked on it. When I visited that page, I found a heading Current Employment Statistics. That looked promising, and when I visited that page I found a bunch of reports. I didn’t know which was the right one right away, so I opened them until I found one (Workforce Investment Areas) that had county level data.
The point is, as I said, it literally took me about five minutes of nosing around to find the key statistic for the local employment trend. It didn’t take any special skill and it didn’t take hours of research. Any reporter should have been able to do the same, and any reporter doing an article on the local economy should have thought to look for statistics on local employment and should have been able to find them in about five minutes.
http://www.ides.illinois.gov/LMI/Pages/CES.aspx
Steve, take me forward from here please. Thank you.
Steve, you have my email address, let’s go that way going forward. Thank you very much. John
You also have to question the ongoing and continued use of articles in the local county newspaper that they get from a few left wing and far left wing national news sources. By using these articles one might assume that the newspaper endorses their leftist biases.
I publically called out on here for saying “lies” – in the face of “Steve Wilsons” words
Poor tipping, witch hunting Skinner.