Legacy media outlets scrambled to save the pro-Bidenomics narratives they’ve been spewing after new data showed inflation came in hot in December.
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report indicated that the price of all goods rose 0.3 percent in December on a month-to-month basis and 3.4 percent on a year-to-year basis, which was hotter than expected. Fox Business analyzed that the new, sticky numbers underscored the “challenge of taming price pressures within the economy.”
But don’t expect the rest of the leftist media to report this development straight without trying to gaslight readers to protect their boss in the White House. MRC Business tallied nine leftist media outlets that desperately attempted to sugarcoat the fact that the inflation rate jumped from its previous figure in November against expectations. Among them were typical culprits like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Hill, with a number of them attempting to spin rising prices as “progress.” Yes, you read that right.
Despite the negative impact that higher prices will inevitably have on the economy, The New York Times claimed that the economy is still “making progress back toward a normal pace.” In an article headlined, “Fresh Inflation Data Shows Intact, but Bumpy, Cool-Down,” The Times kept at its nonsense by predicting that the consumer prices will “moderate” in the coming year and ignoring the persistent negative effects of the still-high inflation rates will have on everyday Americans.
The Washington Post took a similar approach to the inflation numbers. The article’s absurdity spoke for itself: “Inflation rose slightly in December, offering the latest sign that the economy has made significant progress since prices spiked to four-decade highs — but that there’s still a ways to go.” How are bad inflation numbers a “sign” of “significant progress”? Beyond that, prices are still going up, so they haven’t “spiked” by any means.
But wait, there’s more, courtesy of The Hill. Instead of focusing on the fact that the numbers for December, The Hill decided to focus on the supposed “far slower price growth” from the past year. Like The Times, The Hill ignored the fact that prices are now more than 17 percent higher than at the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term.
MarketWatch was also not immune to the news-spinning. Despite the hotter numbers, MarketWatch actually published a piece with an absurdly contradictory headline: “CPI posts biggest increase in three months, but little sign of rising inflation.” What does that even mean? The outlet wasn’t finished.. MarketWatch also complained in a separate piece of propaganda that the recent bad numbers gave ”ammo” to those who are more critical of the state of the Biden economy, and also absurdly said that Americans should “look past signs of sticky inflation.” Never mind the fact that Americans are actually struggling to make ends meet against an increasingly tenuous cost-of-living crisis.
Next on the list came CNN. Like some of the other outlets, CNN praised the supposed drop in the inflation rate in 2023, and ridiculously claimed that the recent report is “mostly, ‘steady as she goes,’” quoting Wendy Edelberg of the Hamilton Project. NBC News followed a similar path. The sub-headline of its report reeked of leftist spin: “As price growth continues to moderate, consumers are still adapting to a new normal.”
Bloomberg News in particular tried to get ahead of the news a day before the BLS report when it put out a piece predicting that 2024 inflation would nearly drop to the Fed’s target 2 percent rate (down from the current over 3 percent). It claimed that some prices were in a “downdraft.” When the report immediately pushed back against Bloomberg’s prediction of lower inflation for consumer goods in a “surprise,” the outlet instead echoed CNN and NBC in its praise of the “year in which inflation broadly eased without doing much damage to the labor market.”
Similarly, The Guardian insisted in its coverage of the December inflation that even though prices rose, “inflation continued to soften.”
The Associated Press, meanwhile, whined about the “disconnect” between the media spin on inflation and how real Americans are experiencing the price squeeze.. “Americans’ average after-inflation take-home pay is up,” the AP claims. But studies show that the average American family needs more than $11,000 a year more than January 2023 just to maintain the same living standard they had in January 2021.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 800-698-4637, The Washington Post at 1-800-477-4679, The Hill at 202-628-8500, MarketWatch at 888-485-2378, CNN at 404-827-1500, NBC News at (212) 664-6192, Bloomberg News at 212-318-2000 (East Coast) or 415-912-2960 (West Coast), The Guardian at customer.help@theguardian.com, and The AP at 844-777-2006 and demand that they stop trying to spin bad inflation news
