Finding the Lead Lining

This morning, prior to the announcement of last week's initial unemployment claims, I was curious whether they'd be higher or lower than last week. Lower would be good news, obviously, and higher bad news. So, when I saw they were slightly lower, I thought, well that's good, at least things have stopped getting drastically worse.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the headline "22 Million Workers File for Unemployment Benefits in Just 4 Weeks". I thought, 'That's a negative way to put it.'

Then, I did a quick survey of other outlets, and they all report the four week total! It seems quite odd to me that every outlet reports the monthly total over the weekly total, and not a single one of them notes that this is down from last week's peak.

CNBC

CNN

Fox Business

New York Times

Wall Street Journal