CONTAINING LINKS TO 1280 STORIES FROM THE NETWORKS' NIGHTLY NEWSCASTS
     COMMENTS: Wheel of Misfortune

You know the economic news is bad whenever ABC rolls out its wheel format to tell you about it. Last month's series of corporate layoffs was illustrated by a montage of woeful vignettes from Steve Osunsami to Barbara Pinto to Neal Karlinsky. Last week's news of a shrinking Gross Domestic Product strung together Betsy Stark and Barbara Pinto and Laura Marquez. Now unemployment is up to 7.6% and ABC illustrates (embargoed link) hard times with Laura Marquez at an overattended jobs fair in Silicon Valley followed by Chris Bury pinpointing twentysomething jobseekers as the hardest hit demographic cohort and Betsy Stark checking out long lines at the unemployment benefits office in Hackensack NJ.

Both CBS' Anthony Mason and CNBC's Trish Regan on NBC cited the statistic that this recession has already cost 3.5m jobs. "The job market is collapsing," Mason generalized. "For 13 straight months now the economy has been shedding jobs, the longest losing streak since the Depression." The last twelve months have seen "the largest yearly decline since 1939," was how CNBC's Regan massaged the same numbers. Regan's pessimism focused on the small business sector citing a survey that 14% of such firms plan to issue pink slips within the next three months. Mason's gloom went like this: "There is nothing that is going to stop unemployment from rising sharply over the next six to eight months."


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