The folks at Reuters never stop hustling. Now they’ve got an exclusive story you won’t find anywhere else:
ZURICH (Reuters) – Employers are having difficulty finding the right people to fill jobs despite high unemployment in Europe and the United States, a survey by U.S.-based staffing firm Manpower showed on Tuesday.
High unemployment in the United States? I had no idea. What a scoop! I bet the folks at AP, who reported just weeks ago that the U.S. unemployment rate has declined to a 4 1/2-year low, are feeling a bit sheepish now that the sleuths at Reuters have broken this thing wide open.
MB reader Gary B. wonders how Reuters got the scoop:
Weren’t the latest unemployment figures the lowest in years? Something like 4.3 percent, wasn’t it? Just to be sure Reuters wasn’t inadvertently repeating an error from the original source, I searched and found the original news release (which, by the way, Reuters simply rewrote and slapped with a Zurich dateline). It says absolutely nothing about “high unemployment” in the U.S. — or anywhere else, for that matter.
Leaving aside the ethics of simply rewriting a press release and calling it journalism, it strikes me as a little shameless to introduce a transparent and blatant falsehood in the lead sentence.
So maybe the U.S. unemployment rate is pretty low. But on the plus side, we’ve solved the mystery of why those employers are having difficulty finding the right people to fill jobs!