-- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The big picture on Wisconsin's job situation is this:But as the Wisconsin gubernatorial campaigns heat up for November, how does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel continue to deal with statistics unfavorable to Walker's promise of 250,000 new jobs by the end of this year? Most recently, by burying actual news and fluffing up Walker's performance.

The state of Wisconsin gained not a single net job in February. In fact, Wisconsin had the second worst number of total job losses among all states last month, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employers in Wisconsin shed an estimated 9,500 total public and private sector jobs in February, the bureau reported late last week.

Many smaller newspapers across Wisconsin made this bad news a headline story over the weekend. In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's grudging coverage, however, you had to look hard for its own report on Friday, inside the paper on the business pages. That story used most of its space explaining why the bad job numbers are not really credible -- in essence accepting without saying so the Walker administration's own spin. Meanwhile, the news story headlined the fact that the state's unemployment rate had declined slightly during the month -- a seeming contradiction that the newspaper had no trouble accepting at face value, despite its worry that the monthly job loss figures were dubious.

Journal Sentinel readers had to the wait until this morning to find further reference to the report, still hard to find on page two, deep in the Politifact Wisconsin column's recurring "Truth-o-Meter" report on how Walker's 250,000-new-jobs-by-2015 pledge is going.

For starters, judging by the little graphic accompanying the piece (see above), casual readers might be persuaded to believe Walker's almost accomplished his goal. Look how far to the end the little green bar has gone. Wow! It must (as Walker frequently likes to say) be working, Wisconsin! But actually, Walker's only about 40 percent of the way to his goal, with virtually no chance of delivering on his promise. To its credit Politfact eventually gets around to mentioning that. Still, the paper says Walker's promise remains "in the works." Besides, as the newspaper reminds us from time to time, governors don't really create jobs, even though it continues to report on their activities as though they do.

The headline accompanying the Politifact piece is similarly unhelpful and even misleading: "Readjustments chip away at 2013 gains," The piece itself only obliquely references the bad job report for February. In so many words: Wisconsin tallies actual job losses in yet another month, but that's just because of "readjustment." By that reckoning, death totals from a June plane crash, upwardly reported in July, would only represent an unimportant "readjustment."

Politifact tried to explain the matter further, saying that "as usual this time of year" the February job numbers included "benchmarking," which it defined as revisions. That, it said, made the February decline seem worse. So, in other words: The losses should have been reported in earlier months, thus February's actual losses are not really as bad as they look, and while earlier losses were worse than previously reported, never mind, because that was then and this is now. Oh. Okay.

If you wanted more detail on the February jobs report, Politifact helpfully provided an online hotlink so readers could click over to a Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development news release from last Thursday. Not only did the state's news release not mention the job losses, the link was completely broken as of Monday. So much for transparent government. We did an online search and found the document at a new URL. But now it was not a "news" release, but only a spin statement from the department's secretary, a Walker appointee, who totally ignored the job losses but fluffed the fact that Wisconsin's unemployment rate over the past year was a little better than across the nation as a whole. However, the secretary -- along with the Journal Sentinel's Friday story hyping the slight jobless rate decline -- discussed that rate without noting how many more out-of-work residents may have given up searching for work, which would, in fact, lower official unemployment.

Meanwhile, both the Journal Sentinel's Thursday news story and today's Politifact column again relied on the usual Walker excuse for bad monthly job reports. Early in his administration, when the job losses grew worse each month, Walker started ignoring the federal government's monthly jobs reports in favor of what he deemed more accurate quarterly reports. The Journal Sentinel went along with that, basically buying into Walker's argument that the quarterly Census on Employment and Wages report, based on actual hard jobs data, is more reliable than the sampled survey undertaken for the monthly report.

All right. But what happens when both the monthly and quarterly Wisconsin reports produce negative results? Read on to see how a governor and a major Wisconsin newspaper evade that contradiction, and how the newspaper spent more of its time dissing Walker's Democrat challenger, blind to the forest because -- yet too often -- it insists upon staring at twigs.