MRC President and Newsbusters publisher Brent Bozell predicted on Feb. 23 that gas prices will keep climbing and the media will keep downplaying that fact to help President Barack Obama.
“The prices are going to continue to escalate and the media are gonna continue to downplay it. This is the kind of story they don't want to cover. It goes against the narrative of the 2012 election and they're gonna do everything they can to get this guy elected. Period,” Bozell said on “Your World with Neil Cavuto.”
His prediction was based on the way the networks have been coverage the story of rising gas prices. “It’s broken record time,” Bozell told Cavuto. Bozell was discussing the double standard of gas price coverage under President George W. Bush compared to Obama.
Bozell explained, “Think about this: when the prices in 2008, when the price of gas hit $3.56-a-gallon, which was you know sky-high for George Bush, in the preceding month there were 97 network news stories. When the gas prices hit $3.56 under Barack Obama, which was Feb. 20, you look at the preceding month there were 21 stories."
Those numbers came from a recent MRC’s Business & Media Institute analysis. BMI also noted a difference in tone of gas prices stories in 2008 compared to 2012. Dismal 2008 reports about “skyrocketing” gas prices included footage of gas lines and talk about the “tough choices” people had to make between food and fuel. Cavuto aired several clips of 2008 coverage to start the segment.
