The News is Fake — Inflation Edition
A friend of mine is a retired police officer. Once he asked a journalist why the press never reported stories about the police doing good things, saving lives, stopping crime. The journalist replied, you read stories about plane crashes, right? My friend agreed. The journalist continued, have you ever read a story about a successful landing?
The annual rate of inflation, 8.5%, has been all over the press for the last couple of days. This is important: My pay raise in my day job is already gone for the year, and most news outlets leave it at that, perhaps mentioning some specific areas that are increasing in price faster than others. So in the superficial telling of the story, the airplane crashed.
Then I stumbled on an article in Axios that told, as Paul Harvey famously said, the rest of the story:
- Inflation is at 8.5% over prices in March, 2021; however,
- Core inflation, the rate of inflation without gas and food, is at 0.3%, which would annualize at around 3.6%, just slightly above the Federal Reserve’s inflation target.
- In the last couple of weeks, oil prices have dropped 24%. Gas prices have dropped 6%.
And then there is a slightly more complex factor in play. Prices this March are measured against last March when prices were depressed due to the Covid pandemic.
Not to diminish what is going on. The core rate of inflation is 6.7%. We are paying a lot more than we were last year for the same basket of goods and services. At issue is what we are not being told, that core inflation is tame, that most of the inflation we are seeing is in petroleum products and food, and that inflation is being measured against a time when things were cheaper than normal.
And that much more benign story is the equivalent of a safe landing. It’s uninteresting. It will not keep eyeballs glued to screens or fingers tapping on stories. It does not fit the meme certain parts of the population would like to think about inflation and the supposed incompetence of the administration. So, unless you’re snooping around sites like Axios or places that link to their story, all you are going to get is that inflation is 8.5%. The boring, rather technical backstory?
You’re not going to see it on the 5:30 news.
In selecting what to tell us and how they choose to tell the story, mainstream news often gives a distorted picture of reality. The competition for your attention forces news media to dumb down, to sensationalize, to curate in ways that distort the truth. Mainstream news outlets are not lying to you, they just aren’t telling you the entire story.
And that, friends, is fake news.
Claps and comments appreciated!
