Improved Unemployment Rate Overshadowed with Negative Sentiments

Despite the slight improvement in the labour force situation, the media has been associating the Employment topic with negative issues such as the White Flag Campaign.

On July 8, the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) published the Statistics of Labour Force Malaysia, May 2021 which showed that the unemployment rate for May 2021 was 4.5% which was slightly lower than the previous month.

The stark improvement can also be seen when comparing the unemployment rate with May 2020 which recorded at 5.3%.

However, due to the rise in Covid-19 cases and the prolonged lockdown which have affected several Malaysians, issues on the unemployment rate did not appear in the monthly top issues for the topic.

The media associating employment with negative issues can also be seen in the news title sentiments data where it is dominated with negative sentiments in July 2021.

This is partly due to the fact that although the unemployment rate has decreased, the number of unemployed Malaysians still remained more than 500,000 persons.

Nonetheless, the trending phrases linked to the Employment topic shows that the media has been highlighting on the unemployment rate since it appeared in the word cloud.

Meanwhile, the influencers list for the Employment topic shows that Finance Minister Zafrul Aziz has been controlling narration, which shows that the government is addressing employment issues.