Governor Perdue announced her budget proposal yesterday. Let’s see if you can make sense of its impact from these reports:

Education bears load in budget (News & Observer 4/21):

The governor’s budget would slash 600 jobs, most vacant. Agency budgets would be trimmed by 5 percent to 7 percent. Schools, community colleges and universities would take a 4 percent hit.

UNC system says it can’t absorb the cuts (News & Observer 4/21):

Perdue calls for a 4 percent cut on top of the 2 percent reduction already included in the two-year budget adopted last year.

That could result in the elimination of 1,200 positions across the UNC system, half from faculty ranks, UNC President Erskine Bowles said Tuesday in a written statement. The result would be bigger classes, fewer course offerings and the elimination of administrators critical to academic and financial integrity, Bowles said.

Gov. Perdue spares UNC system (Daily Tar Heel 4/21):

The 2010-11 budget recommendations released Tuesday by N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue were mostly better-than-expected news for the UNC system.

Perdue rolls out changes for $19B N.C. budget (Associated Press 4/21):

Another 600 positions would be eliminated in addition to the 2,000 this year, according to Perdue, although most of newly targeted positions are vacant.

…

Districts that eliminated more than 4,000 teacher positions this school year while finding a combined $225 million in savings could have to eliminate another 2,430 positions next school year, the North Carolina School Boards Association said.

Hmm. Amazing how different media outlets can look at the same piece of information and present totally different pictures (as in the case of the N&O UNC story vs. the DTH story). Even more amazing that it’s nearly impossible to look at any one of these stories and get an accurate idea of how many jobs are going to be lost. The first N&O story says 600, but then of course, that doesn’t include the 1,200 that the UNC system would lose from its 4 percent budget cut (mentioned in the second N&O story) or the 2,430 that the public schools would need to cut to meet its budget trim (in the AP story). As a current state employee, it bugs the heck out of me that I can’t get a complete picture of the impact of this budget from any of these stories. As a former journalist, it bugs the heck out of me that none of them tries to pull it all together and give me a relatively straight forward answer to a question as simple as “How many jobs could be affected?”