Many people have been referring to Joe Biden’s kinda/sorta presidency as “Obama’s third term” and there is one respect in which that is most definitely true: the constant mainstream media spin about bad economic news.
As someone who remembers a time when some members of the MSM still attempted to do actual journalism, I’ve often thought that their new roles as full-time propagandists for the Democratic National Committee seem like twice as much work. I wonder how many of them might go back to real reporting if they found out that, even though it’s a tough job, it’s still easier than having to pretend that Joe Biden is competent in any way.
Rick covered the latest predictably awful inflation news from Wednesday:
Up, up, and away. Prices in the U.S. are on the rise and the Biden White House still seems mystified about why that’s so.
Prices rose 5.4 percent in September, a little higher than the 5.3 percent rise in August. But according to the White House, prices shouldn’t be rising at all. We were told the increase was “transitory” nothing to worry about and that once things began to get back to normal, inflation wouldn’t be a problem anymore.
But prices continue to rise despite the end of shutdowns and most other disruptions. The culprit, we’re told, is “supply chain bottlenecks.”
The ever-faithful Democratic lapdogs at The New York Times rushed in with some handy spin:
Consumer prices jumped more than expected last month, with rent, food and furniture costs surging as a limited supply of housing and a shortage of goods stemming from supply chain troubles combined to fuel rapid inflation.
It took just four words before the author got to a wordier variation of “unexpected” there. That may not seem like much, but this is the kind of bias that has a cumulative effect. When they keep reporting that disappointing economic indicators are “unexpected,” it creates a sense that the Democrat in the White House is merely a victim of circumstances when it comes to his policies.
On the flip-side, when a Republican is president, he is able to move the entire global economy with his mind, and therefore all bad news is naturally his fault.
Barack Obama presided over an economy that was more sluggish than the intestinal processes of a 90-year-old man who eats nothing but cheese. We were all aware that it was a moribund mess, yet the MSM kept doing its “unexpected” thing every time blah numbers were released. It became a little game among us conservative social-media types to see how many MSM outlets would report the latest economic news with a variation on the “unexpected” theme.
Team Biden’s brain has been spinning on inflation for months already. I wrote last summer about swing voters’ concerns over the matter. The White House approach then was to attempt to bore the public to death with a macroeconomic lecture that they hoped would distract everyone from the fact that they were paying a kajillion dollars for a tank of gas just a few months into Joey Scranton’s presidential tenure.
The Times article also notes a spike in rents and housing costs. Those have nothing to do with the “supply chain bottlenecks,” by the way.
Put simply, the economy under Biden is a disaster. The jobs numbers reported last week were less than half of what analysts expected, but the Times twisted itself into a propaganda knot again and ran a headline that said they were “Pretty Good, Actually.”
Again, carrying that much water all the time for the Dems has got to be exhausting.