Why Report this Way?

This has bothered me for a while now. Why does the media report monthly fluctuations in the economic numbers? For example, Bloomberg recently told us that jobless claims rose from 264,00 to 274,000 That's a 1.04% increase. This is just noise.

There have been much larger increases from month to month, even while the overall trend was downward. There have been equally large month-to-month decreases while the overall trend was upward. Such fluctuations are part of any statistical data set. I can't speak to most media, but if there’s any of them I would expect to know this, it would be Bloomberg. If they didn't, they wouldn't be qualified to report on economics. Why then do they report noise as news?

The measurement interval itself is a matter of convenience. We have to choose a sample rate and months are a unit we're all familiar with. But a month's just a collection of days, which means that 1.04% increase is an average. It masks its own ups and downs.

What if I picked a different interval, say the 15th of one month to the 14th of the next? That suggestion isn't as far as out as it might seem. Consider that many companies have fiscal years that're different from the calendar year. A company could chose July 1 to June 30 as its fiscal year, for example. I'm proposing as a thought experiment a "fiscal month", in this case from from the 15th to the 14th. Now I have a different set of data points, and a different average.

I don't mean to pick on Bloomberg or make a point about jobless numbers. This is an example of what seems to be generally true of media report on any economic indicator.