We absolutely had to focus on bullshit news this week. No, not about the Royal Wedding (my take on that here) but because a couple of crowing headlines about UK wage growth from the nation’s leading providers of broadcast news.

The BBC announced “Year Long Pay Squeeze comes to an end” and Sky News “UK Wages Grow at Fastest Rate in Three Years” in response to the latest quarterly report from the Office of National Statistics. The headline figure that seemed to stick in people’s minds was 2.9% — the total pay rises in the the first quarter of 2018. Which sounds like good news until you get all the way to the next line of the report: over the same period, the inflation rate was 2.7%. Which means this long-awaited rise in real wages was 0.2%.

Try to hold back your tears of pure ecstasy.

Stephen Clarke, Senior Economic Analyst at the Resolution Foundation called it “anaemic” and explained wages are still £700 a year lower than they were a decade ago. A report two years ago by the Trades Union Congress found that between 2007–2015, real wages fell by -10% in the UK. The OECD average over that time was +6.7%. Which makes 0.2% look, well, rather underwhelming.

The wage figures under discussion here are an average, so they’re blind to inequality. We could be seeing huge growth in the top, with stagnation or decline for the rest of the workforce, and have that even out to a net 0.2% gain. The employment figures reported along with the wage rise revelation have a similar flattening effect, as the ONS found the employment rate was at its highest since 1975. But what is the quality of that employment? And does lower unemployment mean the economy at large is better off? Those record numbers of employees are all earning substantially less than they would have ten years earlier, despite the “extraordinary increase in the education levels of the workforce”, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted in 2017.

(The Daily Mail’s take on this story was a near-parody: “Brexit Britain’s Booming! Remain doom-mongers thwarted by jobless rate.” Its lead column calls for the UK to use its “considerable leverage” against Brussels, which is the sort of cunning negotiation ploy that has led the people of this city to largely ignore or pity stray Brits they come across. Just in case Mr Davis and team are reading: please ignore the Daily Mail. These wage and employment figures have nothing to do with the impact of Brexit because Brexit hasn’t actually happened yet. Let’s check back in 12 months shall we?)

Beyond the strange obfuscation of the figures themselves, these headlines are annoying because they put such an odd time span on the issue. The economy has suffered, dramatically, since the catastrophe of the Great Recession and hasn’t come close to recovering since. Young people who have entered adulthood during the last decade have suffered massive problems entering the workforce, buying cars or renting homes. These reports from the ONS are quarterly but that doesn’t mean the reporting needs to examine only the last few months. That lack of proper context is a serious problem because, on a visceral level, those numbers on wage rises doesn’t feel like the whole story. Which is because they aren’t — and further down in the body of the coverage you get the proper nuances outlined. But those headlines set the narrative.

This sort of mismatch between headline and body is prevalent across all areas of online news. When Buzzfeed does it, it gets called clickbait, but I don’t see why this is much better. The headline tells me that the ‘story’ is an economic upside in modern Britain, but five or six paragraphs down it becomes obvious that there is no such thing. Mismatched headlines and articles is a very old problem. It is one that many might regard as harmless. But, in the next breath, those same people probably worry about the tendency of citizens in advanced democracies to be increasingly disengaged and disenchanted with mainstream news. They worry that trust in all major societal institutions is in long-term decline and that the modern information ecosystem is fracturing into self-contained bubbles that threaten democracy.

How the traditional media presents issues like this has a trickle down impact.

A good example is the focus given to these ONS statistics in the first place. We know from previous guests Martin Kirk and Kate Raworth that economics, as a discipline, has a tendency to be mechanistic. The figures we use to measure the health of the economy or the workforce shouldn’t be taken as the be all and end all because they’re really only proxies for something much more complex. Headline writers, communications staff and political speechwriters pick out one or two points that they can communicate a message with — too often, those tiny fragments set the tone for rest of the coverage.

The most satisfying part of Michelle Wolf’s recent White House Correspondents speech was when she turned on the US media establishment for their part in fueling Trump and profiting off the attention he creates so artlessly. I can’t help but think the stentorian backlash to Wolf’s set was driven by that final minute. I don’t mean the knee-jerk response of the partisan press apparatus that attempted to cast Michelle Wolf as a woman-hating woman, I mean the official statement by White House Correspondents Association president Margaret Talev:

“Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and scholarship winners, not to divide people,” Talev said. “Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.”

Tabloids spinning false tales is one thing, but major broadcasters or respected journalists associations is another. We know that the online information landscape is dominated by headlines and soundbites and quotes. Those are the units of news that travel furthest and fastest, which means they require even more scrutiny. The traditional media does a good job of highlighting the faults of other, newer actors for their part in the problems of the modern information environment. They aren’t nearly so good at looking at their own role.