Big Media is already giving tendentious headlines that make the report sound great, so why not give a tendentious headline that makes it sound extra dismal?

The basic actual facts are, unemployment ticked up a tenth of a point, and job creation was decent but still barely beat what you need to keep up with population increases. Yet here is the spin:

Businesses picked up their pace of hiring in October and the unemployment rate rose as more people started looking for work, according to new government data that offer a glimmer of optimism for the long-ailing job market on the eve of the presidential election. Employers reported adding 171,000 jobs in October, beating both analysts’ expectations (125,000 jobs added) and September’s job creation (a revised 148,000). The unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent, up from 7.8 percent, but the reason behind the uptick also points to improvement in the labor market. Some 578,000 more Americans counted themselves as part of the labor force, and only 410,000 more people reported having a job. In one welcome sign, the proportion of the population reporting that they had a job rose one-tenth of a percent to 58.8 percent. The Labor Department counts only those with jobs or looking for jobs as among the U.S. workforce.

Woo-hoo! More Americans count themselves as unemployed. This is good because it takes them out of the ranks of those who have totally given up. It’s nice to have this context — but where was the context when they had totally given up, and they weren’t counted as part of the unemployment numbers?

In truth, the big picture is that the record of this president still sucks. He said he was going to have us at 5.2%. We’re not quite there, huh?

Say it with me: one term proposition!