Soon after Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, The New York times tweeted out a fact check of one of the things he said during his speech. The paper confidently declared one of Biden’s comments only “partially true,” but their rather weak reasoning had thousands of people, particularly historians, far more than partially annoyed.
During his SOTU address, Biden said that “over 6.5 million new jobs” were created in 2021, “more jobs created in one year than ever before in the history of America.”
The New York Times didn’t actually take issue with the factual claims in Biden’s speech. In fact, it declared that he was “correct on the numbers.” So why did he get only a “partially true?”
Because “the government only started collecting this data in 1939.”
Here’s that tweet:
So we probably don’t have to tell you the problem with this, uh, “fact check,” but in case it’s not obvious, we’ll explain below. First, we’d like to share a sampling of the rather unhappy reactions it provoked, particularly those of historians who roasted the laziness and misleading nature of the tweet.
You get the idea.
Anyway, The New York Times seems to be suggesting there’s a possibility that at some point between 1776 and 1939, the American economy added more than 6.5 million new jobs in a single year.
The problem? 6.5 million was 4 percent of the total U.S. population in 1939, which was 130,884,000. However, the total working age population, typically accepted to be between 15 and 64, according to the Census bureau was approximately 54 million. 6.5 million would be a whopping 12.5 percent of the total working age population.
You see where we’re going here: Every year we look back further, the U.S. population gets smaller, and 6.5 million becomes an increasingly bigger percentage. Eventually, you get to 1810, at which point 6.5 million is 89% of the total population of 7,239,000. And in 1800, 6.5 million is actually larger than the total U.S. population.
Oh and also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was established in 1884, so…
Which is to say, while thanks to the lack of a specific historical document that says “this didn’t happen,” we can’t say with 100% certainty that it didn’t happen. But it’s really, really, really unlikely, bordering on impossible. Sadly, The New York Times’ pedantic fact check really doesn’t inform readers at all.