by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:

I get tired of reporters or bots who don’t read beyond the 2nd paragraph of Labor Department press releases. 2.35 million initial state and federal unemployment claims. PUA claims (gig workers) now 41% of total unemployment. 20% of labor force on unemployment insurance.

It just doesn’t let up. An astounding number of newly laid-off workers keeps filing for unemployment benefits week after week and pile on top of the people already unemployed. And the number of people who started working again isn’t big enough to make a visible dent in the curve.

In the week ended July 18, the total number of people who continued to claim unemployment compensation  under all state and federal unemployment insurance programs, including gig workers and contract workers, edged down to 31.8 million (not seasonally adjusted), as reported by the Department of Labor this morning. It was the third highest level ever and just a tad off the peak:

Unabated lazy misreporting in the media.

If you read this morning or heard on the radio that 16.2 million people were claiming unemployment insurance – the “continued claims” – and you thought that there were only 16.2 million people who claimed unemployment benefits, you fell victim to lazy misreporting in the media, by reporters or bots that didn’t read the Labor Department’s press release beyond the second paragraph.

Those 16.2 million were only the claims under state programs, and do not include the claims under federal programs. All combined, there were 31.8 million people on the unemployment rolls. That’s what the Labor Department reported further down in the press release.

There is a huge difference between 16.2 million and 31.8 million unemployed people!

Why do the media misreport this data? A bunch of reporters are sitting in a government room, isolated from the world. At 8 a.m., they get the data from the Labor Department; at 8:30 a.m., the Labor Department makes the data public. Reporters have 30 minutes to write up their piece and send it to their offices at 8:30 a.m., which then publish it in all haste. To get this done in 30 minutes, reporters only read the first two paragraphs of the long convoluted badly-put-together report by the Labor Department. And the result is flagrant misreporting.

The issue is that the claims under federal programs are new, established by the CARES Act, and the Labor Department just inserts them further down in the press release, and then it provides a total of state and federal claims further down – the 31.8 million – instead of putting the total in the first line of the first paragraph so that even lazy reporters or lazily programmed bots, who’ve for years reported only the first two paragraphs, can see it.

I have been reporting the total provided by the Labor Department every week since May. By May 28, I first used a version of the chart you see above, while the WSJ, CNBC, Bloomberg, and others continued to misreport the data.

The total is now slowly cropping up, perhaps under pressure from yours  truly. Bloomberg today put it in the last paragraph, and you had to read through a whole lot of blah-blah-blah to get it. Over the weekend, the WSJ ran an article that for the first time that I know mentioned the total and even included a chart of the total that looked like mine, based on old data. This morning, the WSJ failed to report the total and didn’t show its own chart of the total. It just showed two charts of state claims. What I heard this morning on NPR was painful. In past weeks, they have under-reported actual unemployment claims by nearly half!

And even today, you still cannot see the headline number – 31.8 million people claiming unemployment benefits under all programs – in the financial MSM headlines!

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