"Job Killing" term meaningless. What's new?

You've heard that job killing is what Obama is all about. He wants to kill jobs so he can become a one term president. It's by design. Or so Republicans would tell you. But the research is in and guess what, "job killing" means nothing. Huffington Post:

The phrase job killer is rarely substantiated when it appears in news stories, according to a study published Thursday morning. The analysis, conducted by Peter Dreier of Occidental College and Christopher R. Martin of the University of Northern Iowa, examined every occurrence of the phrase or one of its variants, like "kill jobs" or "job-killing," in articles by the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post going back to 1984. Of the 381 stories that contained the phrase -- usually in a source's quote -- fewer than 10 percent substantiated it.

"The news media's chronic lack of fact‐checking has only encouraged ramped up use of the 'job killer' allegation as a political strategy against the Democrats in recent years," the study says.

The study noted that while legacy papers usually didn't bother to look into job-killing claims, other sources occasionally did, like when PolitiFact.com checked out whether the 2010 health care reform law was as "job killing" as Republicans said it was and found the claim false. It rested on a Congressional Budget Office report (PDF) that found that subsidies in the law would reduce available labor, since some poorer workers won't need to work as much in order to cling to health insurance.

"There have been efforts to try to undermine any kind of fact checking," Martin said in an interview, noting that the phenomenon makes him lose hope for investigative journalism.

A 1922 Los Angeles Times article in which the author described the most efficient job killer as a bad corporate boss. "The job­‐killer is an executive who ruthlessly fires men on the pretext of retrenchment and economy, but really in order to ingratiate and in trench [sic] himself more firmly in the good graces of his own superiors," the author wrote.