News/Commentary

Major media lapdogs readily parrot Biden’s ‘Putin’s price hike’ narrative on inflation

March 17, 2022 | | Print Article

CHECK OUT WeThePeople.store and WeThePeople.wine for holiday gifts and awesome snarky swag!

A large number of establishment media outlets have been engaged in an effort to whitewash the Biden administration’s otherwise clear role in exacerbating inflation and spiking gas prices.

These efforts have ranged from publications posting dubious “fact-checks” accusing Republicans of “wrongly” blaming the administration for the increase in prices, to talking heads eagerly echoing the administration’s “Putin’s price hike” talking point near-verbatim.

To be fair, some of these efforts have been made by clear partisans like the hosts at MSNBC, which is openly billed as a far-left network.

“[Republicans] are blaming Biden for rising gas prices. Meanwhile, guess who gets off scot-free? Not just Putin, but the big oil and gas companies,” far-left host Mehdi Hasan said on Monday.

It was the exact same sort of rhetoric that’s been coming from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who’s tried to portray oil and gas companies as greedy hoarders who’re trying to score one on the American people by keeping supply low and prices therefore high.

“These [oil companies] are private sector companies. We recognize that. Many of them are making record profits. We see that. That is all publicly available data. They have pressure to return cash to investors and their shareholders,” Psaki said just this Wednesday.

She ignored the immense Biden-administration-imposed bureaucratic hurdles that are preventing oil and gas companies from maximizing supply right now.

Over on CNN meanwhile, last week host Alisyn Camerota complained about Republican politicians rightly blaming President Joe Biden for the ongoing inflation crisis.

“Politicians act as though it’s President Biden that caused inflation and that he can fix this,” she said.

But it’s not some Republican talking point to blame Biden for the inflation. According to Reason magazine, a large number of “mainstream academics and economists, one of whom served alongside Biden in the Obama administration” warned for months on end that the president’s spending spree was risking triggering massive inflation.

Yet the president “consistently ignored or downplayed those worries, even as prices ticked upwards throughout the second half of 2021, claiming that rising inflation was a ‘transitory’ problem.”

Case in point:

Other CNN voices like Brian Stelter have instead taken to complaining about those conservative media outlets whom he claims have been “exaggerating” gas prices by only displaying the highest gas prices they can find.

“Take the handful of LA gas stations with notoriously high prices. I mean, I’m only in LA like once a year, and even I know to avoid the station at Fairfax and San Vicente. Like I said, it’s bad enough without showing out-of-context $7 gas signs,” he said this past Sunday.

It’s not clear why it’s wrong to show the highest gas prices during a segment about high gas prices. What’s known is that Stelter has a history of behaving sycophantly toward the Biden administration.

The establishment press has also been boosting the administration’s talking points by running dubious fact-checks.

“Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices,” the headline of a New York Times “fact-check” published last week reads.

“Republican lawmakers supported the ban … asserted that the pain at the pump long preceded the war in Ukraine. Gas price hikes, they said, were the result of Mr. Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, the temporary halt on new drilling leases on public lands and the surrendering of ‘energy independence’ — all incorrect assertions,” the piece itself reads.

While the supposed “fact-check” has been retweeted countless times by Democrats, including Psaki, it’s also provoked an avalanche of pushback from critics armed with receipts:

Try as they might to cover the Biden administration’s tracks, the media appear to be failing, as demonstrated by all the pushback, in addition to the president’s job approval numbers.

Vivek Saxena
Latest posts by Vivek Saxena (see all)

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

Latest Articles