Don't you just hate when that happens?

UK employment data for the three months to March were scheduled for release this morning at 9:30. BBC News 24 normally starts its bulletins on the half-hour, but because of the imminent data, they started a bit early, bringing in one of their economics experts. Just so you could be in no doubt about how they were set to spin the coverage, the expert and the news anchor talked about how it was likely that youth unemployment had moved above a million for the first time.

Right at 9:30 they cut to a spokesman from the ONS in Cardiff, who began to give the numbers. Total employment? Up 118,000, to stand only 300,000 below its pre-financial crisis peak. Unemployment? Down 38,000, with smaller numbers of both men and women out of work. Youth unemployment? Alas for the BBC's carefully planned coverage, it fell by 30,000, to stand at 935,000. The economics expert valiantly tried to talk the numbers down by pointing out that the "claimant count" rose slightly, but the employment minister quickly appeared on-screen to point out that this mainly reflected rationalisation of the welfare system. This is causing recipients to migrate from other programmes onto the jobseeker's allowance scheme that the claimant count measures.

In short, the report was good news*, so of course the BBC dropped it pretty quickly. By mid-afternnon it was buried deep on their webpage, which (I'm guessing here) wouldn't have happened if the data had been dire. The youth unemployment data that they had been prepared to do a song-and-dance about barely made it into the web story. This blandly reported that youth unemployment stood at 935,000, with no mention of the quarterly decline.

None of this is meant to downplay the problem of youth unemployment. An Unemployment rate of 20% among 16-24 year olds is a national disgrace, but it clearly owes more to the failings of the education system** than to the effects of the government's spending cuts, which the BBC was undoubtedly primed to blame until it got blindsided by the facts. They (and the rest of the media, come to that) really are incorrigible, aren't they?

* Unless you agree with @CJFDillow, who tweeted thus: Employment rose 0.4% in Q1. Implies productivity rose 0.1% V.weak - suggests empt growth is unsustainable. Well, it might mean that Chris. Or it might mean that the 0.5% first estimate for Q1 GDP growth was too low, which is what some of the other data are suggesting.

** This explanation is strongly suggested by this jaw-dropping little nugget from the ONS data release itself: The number of UK born people in employment was 25.09 million in the three months to March 2011, up 77,000 on a year earlier. The number of non-UK born people in employment was 4.04 million, up 334,000 from a year earlier.