Multiple Fox News and Fox Business segments covering the September jobs report — released on November 20 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics after significant delay due to the government shutdown — celebrated the relatively tepid job gains of 119,000 new jobs. 

These same segments glossed over or ignored negative revisions to the July and August jobs numbers, which actually showed the economy shedding jobs in August.

On her program, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo crowed that the jobs report showed “better-than-expected numbers.” 

“To me, this looks like a very strong report,” she said. “This is a very strong jobs number, at a time that people were questioning jobs strength here.” 

She later added, “I’d call that a blowout.” 

Conservative economist Stephen Moore replied: “I agree. … I think people are under-hyping this economy big time.”

Later in the program, a guest touched on the downward revisions, mentioning the changes to attack the BLS, much like Fox has done in the past — but didn’t mention that the August jobs numbers had turned negative.

Bartiromo continued promoting the jobs report as “a good report” on America’s Newsroom, saying that it shows “an economy that is growing, an economy that is producing jobs.” 

Later on America’s Newsroom, Fox Business correspondent Edward Lawrence said: “This could be considered a blowout report.” 

On Fox & Friends, Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis said, “This is a good report … by all accounts,” and added that the four-year high unemployment rate “is not a great headline for the president,” and that “people will look at that and maybe think the economy isn’t doing well, but it actually is.”

While Fox personalities were praising this jobs report, they didn’t mention that it showed that the economy lost 4,000 jobs in August. From the September jobs report:

As a reminder, Fox was so pessimistic about the employment situation in August that, before that month’s report came out, network personalities began excusing an expected weak month of job growth by echoing President Donald Trump’s attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and its data production.

Crucially, and contrary to Fox's spin, these September data and prior month revisions are not giving a snapshot of the economy right now. 

The data for September predates the historic government shutdown, which shaved billions of dollars from the economy and is likely to have coincided with significant job losses — the payroll firm ADP estimated the private sector was losing 11,250 per week in October. 

And due to complications from the government shutdown, the Labor Department has canceled the official BLS employment situation for October.

Some economic experts have also pointed out that the September jobs report was, in fact, not particularly strong. 

New York Times chief economics correspondent Ben Casselman noted that “this is the highest the unemployment rate has been since October 2021, when the economy was still emerging from the COVID pandemic.” 

Harvard University economics professor Jason Furman called it “a weakish jobs report,” noting that the “3-month average is only 62K” jobs created. 

Economics writer Joey Politano wrote: “The unemployment rate for Black Americans remained at 7.5% in September, the highest level since 2021 and a nearly 1.9% increase from the start of this year.”

Fox itself had attacked President Joe Biden over one September jobs report during his term of office that featured significantly more job gains than the most recent data. In 2023, Fox Business host Charles Payne declared that the 336,000 job gains initially estimated for that September — nearly three times more than in this jobs report — “was not a strong jobs report.”