They are not totally fake, but engineered to show only the good parts. Like when fuel prices drop, and this appears in the data as huge inflation reduction, when in fact food and shelter prices are growing faster than anyone wants to admit.

Then I guess nothing is truly measureable and we should never attempt to make predictions.

If unemployment and inflation rates are politically gamed nothing is truly measurement?

Many things can be measured. And unemployment is measuring something but not what it's titled suggests. It's measuring some group of people who qualify as looking for work within a specific timeframe. Someone looking for work for a few years is deemed to employed by this calculation some might question it.

Changing the definition of a recession is political.

That doesn't mean measurements are incorrect and prediction is impossible.

My comment was sarcasm. OP is being a defeatist to anyone trying to explain that, yes, actually, you can measure these things. You don't need the media to spoonfeed you fake information.

By the time a number is getting printed in the newspaper, Goodhart's Law has already taken effect. Anyone who has a good metric is keeping it quiet, the only way to know anything is to get deeper into the details than the average voter.

There are many numbers and government numbers are not fake. They're cherry picked, there's a difference.