Remember that blowout September 2024 jobs report the broadcast networks slobbered over in October just before the presidential election? Well, the government admitted last week to a big whoopsie in configuring the jobs numbers. Sure enough, ABC CBS and NBC were clearly not as keen on letting viewers know they just mindlessly swallowed up what the Biden administration spit out for political leverage.
In September 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stated October 4 that a supposedly gangbusters-level 254,000 jobs were supposedly added to the economy, just in time for the election. An MRC Business tally found the lead ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows from October 4 and subsequent October 5 mornings shows spent a combined 13 minutes and 27 seconds (or 807 seconds) singing its praises.
But when the report was heavily revised, the networks sang a different tune. As it turned out on September 9, 2025, the BLS would heavily revise its benchmark jobs report, conceding it vastly overestimated the Biden era jobs growth in the 12-month period ending March 2025 by nearly 1 million jobs, completely undercutting the over-sensationalized pre-election reporting by the Big Three.
Taking the September 9 evening and September 10 morning news shows, ABC, CBS, and NBC spent only seven minutes and 10 minutes (or 430 seconds), which was less than 60 percent of the original Biden jobs media hype. ABC’s Good Morning America didn’t even cover the revision story at all after giving 89 seconds to the retrospectively inaccurate September jobs report.
Back in September 2024, the then-crop of evening anchors — David Muir, Norah O’Donnell and Lester Holt — used the report to embellish the illusory genius of Bidenomics. The anchors specifically praised this as evidence of “an improving economy,” a “robust jobs market” and pre-election “welcome news.”
Watch MRC Business Mashup of Network Coverage of Pre-Election Jobs Report Spin Below
Spot the clear tilt yet? It’s clear that these organizations were trying to drum up hype over the Biden economy to push Harris over the finish line come Election Day.
PBS NewsHour: Equal Time, Opposite Spin
As an addendum, MRC Business also looked at how both stories were covered by the taxpayer-funded propagandists over at PBS News Hour. Despite roughly equal coverage time given to both the pre-election jobs report and the massive jobs revision report released around a year later, how the network treated both stories were diametrically different.
For the September 2024 jobs report, co-anchor Amna Nawaz beamed how this bolstered the notion that Americans were supposedly living in a “robust American economy” before proceeding to let Biden’s Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo go on a victory lap by claiming how this supposedly reflected the “progress we are making on the economy.”
But when the major downward benchmark revision was later released on September 9, co-anchor Geoff Bennett brought on Macropolicy Perspectives founder Julia Coronado to downplay the report and do impromptu public relations for the BLS’s credibility, which the Trump administration had accused of gross ineptitude. Coronado went unchallenged by Bennett when she arbitrarily claimed that the accusations were “completely unfounded.”
But this was blatant deception. The BLS jobs revision marked the second, consecutive, major downward benchmark jobs revision during the Biden era in a row, even leading Bloomberg chief economist Anna Wong to admit recently that the U.S. was likely in a “recession” since the Spring of 2024. Even CNN admitted the revision was a major “stain on Joe Biden’s legacy” in a September 20 story. But PBS News Hour wouldn’t really get that sentiment watching Bennett’s reporting.
NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck contributed to this study.
