Making Reporters Use Government Equipment to Write About Jobs Numbers?
The deadline is closing in on a Labor Department order requiring news organizations to use government computers and equipment to distribute sensitive economic data — including the politically important and sometimes unsavory monthly jobs report.
Until now, reporters have been provided the Labor data shortly before the embargoed release time to analyze and draft their stories from a lock-up room at the department. When it’s release time, the Labor Department flips a switch to let news organizations transmit over secure lines that the wire services have paid for and installed in the lock-up room.
News organizations have been ordered to remove all of their equipment from the Labor Department by June 15 and will only be allowed to use government computers, software, and other equipment.
“Unlike any other federal agency, the Department of Labor is requiring that reporters write news articles on government owned and operated computers on a regular basis, which would give the government unfettered access to reporters notes and drafts,” Bloomberg News executive director Daniel Moss told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today. “No administration anywhere should have access to a reporter’s thoughts, drafts or notes as a condition for covering the news, let alone news of such importance.”
News organizations were not consulted on the “unprecedented” policy change, Moss said, but “it was presented as nonnegotiable, a fait accompli.”
The Labor Department would also require transmission over the hack-susceptible Internet instead of the secure wire transmission lines set up by the media, limit the credentialed news organizations in the room, and impose a new yet undefined “code of conduct” on reporters.
Noting that the results of the order would be “potentially catastrophic,” Moss said, “The prospect of a deliberate disruption, potential spoofing, potential market manipulation are real.”
The reliability of government lines as opposed to the equipment invested in the operation by private enterprise is also a concern, as last August the Labor Department’s website went down for an hour after the release of the monthly unemployment report. The unemployment rate then was a stagnant 9.1 percent.
“When the Department of Labor hosted a conference call on April 16 ostensibly to answer media questions on the new policy, I asked, quote, ‘what is the problem you think, you imagine this will prevent?’” Moss told the panel. “The Department of Labor’s response was, ‘I think we’re going to move on. Operator, we’ll take the next question.’”
The Labor Department made the move after a study by government-owned Sandia National Laboratories recommended changes to mitigate security risks with the potentially market-shaking data.
“A leak of this data could have negative consequences,” said Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). “For example, in the hands of certain traders, early access to this data, even if just by a few seconds, could allow their powerful computer trading algorithms to manipulate in markets and reap millions of dollars.”
Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who called on the White House last night to intervene and stop the policy change, said the “unprecedented action has serious freedom of the press implications.”
Great news from the Department of Plenty: The chocolate ration has been increased in Oceania! Great news comrades!
That’s the “Ministry” of Plenty, comrade.
Of course, now that you’ve committed the thought crime, I will be required by my Party allegiance to report you to Attack Watc….er, the Ministry of Love.
Miniluv Party members will be along shortly to “interview you”.
You forgot to add that he will also lose his ration of chocolate for the remainder of the year, Comrade.
Old Lie Returns In New U.S. Jobs Report
By now, everyone has heard the “surprising” bad news: the BLS announced ‘only’ 69,000 net “new jobs” for the month. However, what the BLS hid from the Sheep was that it added 204,000 more fantasy birth/death jobs. Instantly that jobs-gain of 69,000 becomes a jobs loss of 135,000 – before the BLS has engaged in its two monthly “revisions”, where 10’s of thousands more fantasy-jobs will be erased.
With one more revision to come for April, and two ahead for May, what we see is already bad enough. In just April and May we already see more than ¼ million lost jobs in the U.S. economy. Understand that this is still just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to BLS deceit. I’ve already mentioned that it also uses “seasonal adjustments” as another means of inventing vast numbers of fantasy-jobs each year. But just as the U.S. government uses a vast array of “adjustments” to falsify its inflation numbers, it does the same with employment.
How many jobs has the U.S. economy really lost in April and May? When did the job-losses really begin? Was the U.S. economy ever producing positive jobs-growth during this mythical “recovery”? No one but a handful of strategically-placed members of the U.S. government (and the omnipresent Wall Street “insiders”) know the real answer to those questions.
Many continue to scoff at my unflinching dismissal of the “U.S. economic recovery” as nothing but a propaganda myth. The numbers strongly support my position. Ask the BLS itself where most of the U.S. jobs-growth has come from during this supposed recovery, and without hesitation the BLS will point to the “robust U.S. manufacturing sector” – where it claims most of these fantasy-jobs have originated.
Here’s the problem: since the start of the U.S. “recovery”, U.S. energy consumption and even electricity consumption has collapsed. So great has this collapse in energy consumption been that the Wall Street Journal recently trumpeted the news that the United States – the world’s great energy glutton of the past century – was now a “net energy exporter”.
Any serious review of the data reveals that we have full employment with the real unemployment rate probably being less than 1%. All of those other people that the BLS is counting are simply out of work. It’s really quite simple – you can’t be unemployed if there aren’t any jobs and the jobs that have disappeared over the last 3-4 years are no longer temporary adjustments. They aren’t just the dismissal of the night shift due to less demand; now all shifts have been dismissed, the equipment has been idled and the plant closed. Adding those jobs back isn’t simply a matter of hiring a few additional people. It will require significant investment, years of jumping over regulatory hurdles, and confidence that the rapacious government will allow the business to be profitable in both the short and long term. The rhetoric in Washington certainly isn’t conducive to a recovery and Romney’s plan is far too timid to amount to anything. Welcome to the new normal.
Yes, my first thought was “Who cares if they go to silly lengths to protect completely unreliable numbers?” I’m a bit surprised the market still reacts to these reports.
Bad data is useful if it is reliably bad data. Since these reports can be assumed to be incorrect in generally overestimating the numbers, that assumption can be plugged into a model that compensates for the expected bias. It isn’t rocket science, though it is more art than science if the compensations are to be accurate. That’s also why people run multiple models, all with the same data and different methodologies, and examine them for convergence.
Well, I am sure that everything will be on the up-and-up, all the data will be secure and not tampered with and now we can really depend on all the numbers being correct.
/sarc off
Why don’t all of the major news organizations get together and just refuse to attend? I know this is information that people want but let the DOL do whatever they do down in their little locked cellar and then call the media and tell them the numbers. The journalists can then write their stories on their own computers. Or, if the media really NEED to be there, get the numbers, then leave the building, WITHOUT writing the article, go back to their home or office and do their writing there. It wouldn’t take much protesting, much standing up for the DOL to realize that if they’re going to play hardball, nobody is going to play with them and they will become ignored, useless. And no government could deal with that.
I see this as nothing less than state-controlling of the press. Sure, in a small way at first, which really isn’t small, but later to require ALL papers to use ONLY government supplied data and equipment and to transmit their information ONLY over government-installed lines.
It’s been clear to me for a long time that there are a lot of people who think the Constitution is toilet-paper. I suppose the one thing that I often fantasize about is a news reporter asking Holder, or Axelrod, “So, why do you dismiss the Constitution? Why do you feel it’s unnecessary? Why do you trample it so?”
We already know what Obama thinks; That it’s a document of “negative rights” in that it tells the government what it CAN’T do which is precisely its intent in that the founders KNEW how people are with power and what they do with it.
I suppose the real dichotomy is how, if a republican administration had told the papers what this administration is telling the papers, there’d be hell-to-pay.
It is perfectly obvious the Ministry of Truth wants a complete Monopoly on who can best distort, spin and edit this sensitive data.
The earnestly believe that they are the best qualified to make the correct distortions. Dr. Goebbels, has been raised from the dead to lead this great leap forward, aided by Winston Smith, recently returned from Oceania, London, and the Red Planet.
There had been talk of entrusting this duty to Joe Biden, but he couldn’t stay awake long enough to sign up.
Oh Brother, oops Oh Big Brother!
This is a good news / bad news situation. The good news is that the Feds are finally admitting that the media are employees of the Propaganda Ministry. The bad news is that with the admission some streamlining in staffing is in order and the unemployment rate for media personnel will necessarily skyrocket. It’s really a sad day when the Useful Idiots are no longer useful.
Until about a month ago, there was a weekly unemployment report released by the BLS every Friday. That was the report that famously had been revised upward for 68 of the past 70 weeks. A few weeks ago, it just vanished from sight and has not been heard from since. And what happened yesterday? After being in a free fall for weeks, the stock market rallied 280 points on Scott Walkers landslide victory in Wisconsin. The media barely noticed the huge turn around and made some vague reference to hopeful signs of some refinancing in Spain. There was no document or agreement sited as the basis for this and every news story was in lock step. In the run up to the recall election this was supposed to be the biggest thing leading up to the national election in November. The next day, all you could find in the news was reports that the exit polls (which were off by 10 points) determined that Obama was more popular than Romney in Wisconsin. This propoganda stuff is really getting out of hand.
“market rallied 280 points on Scott Walkers landslide victory in Wisconsin”
I never heard any news story relating these two events but I wondered about a possible correlation as soon as I saw the futures numbers yesterday morning. Walkers victory along with the two California cities voting to rein in retirement spending came to my mind as soon as I saw that investors were looking optomistic after 2 or 3 weeks of gloom. I wonder if they don’t see these 3 things as bad news for Obama and the democrats this fall and are betting on a Romney win.
Hard to tell but that’s the idea that I got yesterday.
Face it. We really don’t need news organizations anymore, especially with democrat administrations in charge. They simply print the party line anyway.
I suggest our Dear Leader abolish news organizations altogether and create a new Department of Public Information. He could appoint Debbie Wet-Golden-Retriever Schultz as the new czar.
By creating and funding a new federal bureacracy, he could then claim he’s actually reducing the size of government and saving jobs at the same time.
I think this is a winner. Somebody call Axelrod.
Oh, H-E-L-L no. Even if we overnight turn into the USSR circa 1955, don’t subject us to daily doses of Deb. That’s just inhumane.
And just in time for elections….which come to think, is probably another outdated vestige from our racist, capitalist, Eurocentric past we need to jettison for it only hinders the glorious advance of hope and change for all the little people.
Shades of Stalin. Tell me they’re not statists thugs of the usual low order. What, no front page coverage, no dramatic lead in on the 6:30 news, no rightous screams about a Jeffersonian free press? I do hope the NY Times front pages this one. Like the lap dogs they are they will put their tails between their legs and save their venom for Republicans.
Security concerns is laughable…its the Obumbo Admin. itself that has been releasing sensitive security info to the Media/Hollywood. Wake up Media/Press, you are propagandists for a regime that obviously doesn’t even trust you to stay loyal to them. This is nothing less than the supression of labor statistics in a “sensitive” election year. The most transparent Admin. ever doing everything it can to hide the truth from the American people.
Have to agree with Jefferson: let the media wait until the govt releases the numbers before they write their news stories. Can’t the markets wait thirty minutes before they get the news?
Here is yet another reason not to trust the MSM. If they don’t make this a public issue then why believe anything they say? The Obama administration is more concerned about unemployment numbers being released early than it is about sensitive undercover military operations being revealed? This isn’t the DOD we’re talking about. It’s the LABOR DEPARTMENT.
Sorry. The immediate vision I have is a dark basement room with pipes running across the ceiling, crowded newsmen huddled over 1980′s circa computers, and small drones floating overhead reading everything they write, zappping them occasionally.
Better yet, scribes in monestary garb shackled to desks writing everything out in long hand.
I recall several years ago when this admin touted the bravery and excellent governship of Hugo Chavez when he took control of all media to control his message……in order to progress the country without impediment.
This is public information being released to the public. There is no disaster or crisis scenario being prevented.
Seems more like the “Ministry of Restatement” than Dept of Labor. How many ‘restatements’ have they issued since 2008? More retractions than the 9th Circut but only half as many as the NYT. They’re in good stead.
Let’s say that there is an actual security risk that needs to be addressed. The questions then become what is that risk and how can you prevent it. If there is a risk, and I’ll have to admit that it is possible, then the obvious problem is that with the relatively new wireless technology, please remember we’re talking about the government, people could broadcast the information without relying on the secured lines. If that is the case then the solution to the problem is much simpler. You install a faraday cage around the room and paint it with shield paint. This would prevent electronic signals from entering or exiting the room. No muss no fuss, just address the problem with proven technology.
You could also have a Tempest team do a check when it is time for the data to be processed. That would most definitely show if anyone is violating the rules.
In the old USSR, you had to park a copy of the output of any typewriter with State security so they could match it to samizdat material.
The only security risk is numbers being released ahead of time to someone who uses them to trade on inside information. Anything else is pure propaganda.
Greetings from Pravda and Izvestia:
“Comrades and Fellow Travelers:”
“Under the great leadership of Comrade Stalin,
we are proud to announce that our second 5-year
plan has resulted in the greatest increase in
Ukrainian farm-productivity since the times of
the corrupt and treasonous Tsar Peter. Thanks to
Comrade Stalins enlightened leadership in enforcing
individual farmers’ combining their efforts in
collective farms for the benefit of all of our
rapidly industrializing worker brigades, the need
to import feed grain has been totally eliminated, and
the per capita production of wheat has nearly doubled.
We applaud Comrade Stalin’s great and unselfish efforts
to bring about this miracle. We wish him continued success.”
Summer, 1933 ????
(Not mentioned that 3/4 of the Ukrainian farmers and
families had starved to death; that prior to this all of
their chickens, cows, and oxen had been slaughtered to postpone
starvation –thus no need to import feed grains; the seed grain
had been consumed; and generally everyone knew that no figures
were published because either they were bogus, or unavailable in
the first place. Also, everyone knew that the polit-bureau
control freaks in Moscow were having another frenzied field day
but nobody was going to do anything about it, ’cause that would be
injurious to one’s “health”.)
My advice to any honest journalist — assuming there are any left –
is: don’t go there. Let them sit on their own data, right, wrong,
good, bad, bogus or otherwise. Let’em spin it and lie, or not, any way they wish. They don’t really need your help. They need your cooperation and
approval to make themselves look good, to gain that little fig-leaf of moral probity they haven’t earned and do not deserve. Don’t give it to them! Plenty of other data in a globalized data-world to check the accuracy of figures they’ll have to publish themselves — or withold. Once they publish their own data, every 1st amendment right will be on your side to find fault with it in any way you deem justified. If, instead, you cooperate with their crazy scheme, they will forever control you; you, AND your published work. As I believe Ayn Rand once wrote, in Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden speaking to Dagny Taggart: ‘..if you want to expose a big and vicious lie, comply with it, literally… they need your approval, the sanction of the victim…don’t give it to them …if you value your life…’, or words to that effect. A warning to be heeded!
Either way, we will all soon find out what their game really is –
as if we didn’t know it already! Saying “No” is not just the best answer,
it’s the only answer that will count!
Update,
GovCo has backed off: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/09/labor-department-backs-off-plan-forcing-reporters-to-use-government-issued/
“The Labor Department has backed off a plan to force news agencies to use government-issued computers and other equipment to report on jobless reports and other key economic data, following a GOP-led House hearing this week, according to several published reports.
Agency officials have said they want reporters who analyze, then write about economic reports inside their so-called “lock up” room to use U.S. computers, software and Internet lines so the government can further protect against such potential security breaches as hacking.
But the plan also resulted in cries about potential free-speech violations and the government now having computer access to news agencies.
“This proposal threatens the First Amendment,” Bloomberg News Executive Editor Dan Moss said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. “The government would literally open the reporters’ notebooks.””
So, one would think that the in-the-tank media still has some scruples left after all. Yet, they’ll still whitewash the data for Mr Iwon.