We got new inflation data Tuesday for the U.S., and the news is damn good. The New York Times’ main article on the subject make that clear. The headline reads: “Inflation Rate Cools as Fed Plots Next Interest Rate Move.” Over on the Business section page, the headline is: “Inflation Continues to Cool, Offering Relief to Consumers.”
Both links lead to the same article, and here’s the text under the headline: “Consumer prices rose 4 percent in the year through May, the slowest pace in more than two years and an encouraging sign as the Fed plots its next interest rate move.”
Plus, the Times provided a helpful graphic, which makes the improving inflation numbers crystal clear.
Ah, but how does CNN’s website present today’s inflation news? Let’s just say they took a different approach:
This is a screenshot of a section of the front page, the only part of it that mentions inflation. I’m not suggesting CNN should have put the numbers at the top of the page, given the Trump-apalooza going on down in Miami; that’s not the issue.
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The issue is the way they are talking about inflation. The huge headline in bold is presented as the most important information: CNN has chosen to strongly and visually emphasize the bad news in one limited category of consumer spending. They’ve made that bad news at least twice as big as the overall good news—which appears third, separated by another article, on the list of economic headlines—that inflation is “coming down back to earth.”
Plus, they’ve put the bad news right under a visual image that speaks powerfully to consumers, that of a shopping cart filled with groceries—which just happens to be the first word of the bad news headline. Doing so tells a story totally in conflict with the actual news. I mean, come on!
We’ll never know how many people getting their information on the economy today from CNN.com will only see the bad news, and ignore the much larger good news that inflation—despite the increase in grocery prices—is coming down big time. By contrast, even articles from other outlets that also focus on the grocery news presented things in a more accurate way.
On Yahoo News, an article has the headline: “Inflation: Egg prices see largest monthly decline in 72 years, grocery prices slightly increase last month.”
From a purely human-interest perspective, that kind of historic drop in egg prices—which have climbed significantly in prior months—is pretty damn eye-catching. Plus, the headline notes that the overall grocery price increase was a slight one.
As we’ve seen, the mainstream media has been overhyping bad news and stirring up recession fears for well over a year now. It’s not just Fox News and the other mini-Foxes on the right. Today we see that CNN is still obviously pursuing recently departed chief executive (schmuck) Chris Licht’s mandate to not be seen as liberal—even when the news is good for President Joe Biden (not to mention for, you know, America).
Inflation is a serious issue, and it’s one the Trumpist Party has talked about constantly for many months. Good news on the inflation front is bad news for them politically, so CNN just can’t help itself—the “down the middle” news perspective won’t allow them to simply tell the truth, to present reality to their audience.
I guess this reiterates the point made by “Stephen Colbert” (in character) back in 2006, namely that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
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Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)