It’s apparently Opposite Day. A leftist economic think tank funded by George Soros is crying that the media lied about President Joe Biden’s economy … by trying to convince everyone that it was bad. What is this, the Twilight Zone?
Center for Economic and Policy research co-founder Dean Baker put out a nutty blog March 26 headlined, “Yes, the Media Lied About the Pre-Election Economy.” At first glance we would agree with that, but digging into the finer details reveals that Baker wasn’t referencing how much leftist media outlets simped for Bidenomics to the point of beclowning themselves into a poorly choreographed circus act. In fact, in Baker’s upside-down world, the media was supposedly just telling the public that the Biden economy was actually a disaster.
Soros funneled $1,011,518 into Baker’s outfit between 2016 and 2023 alone.
“As I’ve argued many times, a big factor was the media (the NYT and WaPo, I don’t mean Fox) had poisoned the well, continually highlighting or even inventing bad news about the economy,” Baker railed. Uh, what?! Is that why outlets like Politico were adamant that Vice President Kamala Harris was riding a so-called “dream economy” into the election because they were just continually “highlighting” or “inventing bad news?”
How about when Politico praised Biden’s “‘holy grail’” economy or when The New York Times ran the headline “The Economy Looks Sunny, a Potential Gain for Biden” on the same day in February 2024 alone?
How about The Washington Post’s repeated treatment of voters as idiots for not realizing how great the Biden economy supposedly was? Or how about this beauty from The Times from July 25, 2024, “2025 Could Be a Great Time to Be President, Economically Speaking?” Here’s another absurd pre-election gem from The Times, “The Economy Looks Strong as Election Day Nears.”
Insanity doesn’t even begin to describe Baker’s ridiculous historical revisionism, but luckily the MRC has the video records of the media’s general treatment of the Biden economy during his presidency. Grab some popcorn, watch the clip below and judge for yourself.
Media: The Economy Is Actually 'Fantastic,' Voters Are Just Too Dumb To Notice
In a nutshell, the media was doing the very pro-Bidenomics tribal dancing that Baker made it seem like was non-existent. Instead, he cherry-picked just two stories from The Times, one from The Post and a generic allusion to media that reported on the retirement crisis or recent college graduates not being able to own a home as his evidence to back up his claims that the media writ large was just pooh-poohing Biden’s economic record. That was it. But Baker doubled down:
These are some of my highlights, but the point is the ‘bad economy’ was a repeated theme of the media’s reporting throughout the Biden years. I don’t expect the media to tell people how to feel about the economy, we all know people hate inflation and everyone has heard the story that workers think they have ‘earned’ their pay increases, while inflation is the government’s fault, but this doesn’t justify the media’s mis-representing reality to tell a story that isn’t true.
Oy vey.
Baker’s faux-furor over the media stemmed from his citation of new data from another leftist anti-free market think tank heavily funded by Soros, the Economic Policy Institute, suggesting that low-end, minimum wage workers experienced supposedly explosive wage growth for the year 2024, “bucking historical trends.” “It shows that workers, especially those at the bottom of the wage distribution, had substantial real wage gains since the pandemic,” claimed Baker. He embellished further: “[T]here were long periods over the last half-century where wages for lower and middle-wage workers did not keep pace with inflation. In the last five years, they not only kept pace, but hugely exceeded inflation.”
Not so fast. Research was also released by Statista in February 2025, which found that “[d]espite the level of wage growth reaching 6.7 percent in the summer of 2022, it has not been enough to curb the impact of even higher inflation rates. The federally mandated minimum wage in the United States has not increased since 2009, meaning that individuals working minimum wage jobs have taken a real terms pay cut for the last twelve years.”
The other inconvenient factoid about the EPI report Baker is waving around like a foam finger at a ballgame is that he apparently distorted the findings. There’s a surprise (not)! MarketPlace, which covered the same report that Baker did, was much more upfront about what the EPI data really showed: “The lowest paid workers saw wages rise since the pandemic, but many still struggle.” MarketPlace turned to W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research Senior Economist Brad Hershbein, who “said even with that jump in wages many of the lowest-paid workers are still struggling, and that inflation has hit them particularly hard. ‘[Those workers] tend to buy things that are more subject to inflation, and those things also represent a larger share of all the things that they buy,’ he said.”
Baker is virtually guilty of committing the very media gaslighting on the Biden economy that MRC Business had been reporting on for years in effectively telling struggling Americans: Stop complaining, you’re actually doing great economically but you’re just too dumb to see it. Real estate company Redfin released another report February 24, 2025, which found that “[t]he average minimum-wage earner in the U.S. would have to work 106 hours per week to afford the $1,599 median-priced apartment.”
This was a minor step down from the “125 hours” peak in 2022 when the inflation rate hit 40-year highs and the median asking rent was over $1,700, but Redfin noted that this was still “20.4% ($271) higher than pre-pandemic (January 2020) levels.”
"A rule of thumb in personal finance is that people should spend no more than 30% of their earnings on housing, though this rule has become harder to follow as housing costs have soared,” Redfin stated. “Many minimum-wage workers are spending over 30% to make ends meet. Many are also living in apartments with below-average rents.”
Another March 2025 report from MortgagePoint found that “more than half of Americans say they feel ‘overwhelmed’ by rising utility costs, mortgage payments, and rent, leaving many consumers with little money left over after paying their monthly housing expenses,” based on new research from American Home Shield. Just on energy bills alone in the past year, “Americans reported an average rate increase of 11%, and more than three out of five are unaware of the reasons for these increases,” MortgagePoint reported.
Does that sound like an economy that Americans should be just tickled pink over, Baker?
NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D'Agostino contributed to this report.
