I’ve long gotten over the idea that media will ever be objective, but you would think they’d at least try to do a better job of obfuscating their bias, right?
Apparently not. When gas prices were steadily going up for a year and a half under Joe Biden, the media had firmly taken the position that presidents are powerless to do anything about gas prices.
Earlier this year, CNN’s Matt Egan reported that “presidents have limited power to lower gas prices” in a story headlined “Gas prices are in the danger zone. Biden can’t do much about it.”
It was a cute story, especially since just a few years earlier, Egan was more than happy to link gas prices to presidential actions–when, in 2018, he reported that experts believed that Trump’s efforts to get the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal would likely inflate gas prices.
The network has long held that Biden is powerless to do anything about gas prices. In May, CNN business correspondent Rahel Solomon said, “There is very little any sitting U.S. president can do in the short term to try to lower prices.”
Joe Biden also washed his hands of responsibility for rising gas prices, blaming Trump, COVID, Big Oil and gas stations, and, of course, Vladimir Putin for rising costs—as if that would make us forget everything he’s done to make gas prices high.
Related: Are Exorbitant Gas Prices a Feature or a Bug for the Biden Administration?
But now Biden is rushing to take credit for the recent downward price trend.
“Gas prices have been dropping for 34 days straight, about 50 cents a gallon. That saves the average driver about $25 a month,” Joe Biden tweeted from the official POTUS Twitter account earlier this week. “I know those extra dollars and cents mean something. It’s breathing room. And we’re not done working to get prices even lower.”
I suppose this is better than the DCCC telling us we should thank Biden for a 2¢ decrease in gas prices. They’re still high, but they are noticeably better than they were a month ago. But, of course, as PJ Media readers know, Biden doesn’t actually deserve credit for bringing prices down. And, even though CNN has spent much of the past year or so saying that Biden is powerless when it comes to gas prices, now that we have seen an itty bitty smidgeon of relief at the pump, the notoriously biased network has abruptly changed course, and wants you to believe that Joe Biden “did that.”
Earlier this week, Biden energy advisor Amos Hochstein appeared on CNN Newsroom with Ana Cabrera, in which he claimed that Joe Biden “took a lot of steps over the last six months to be able to alleviate the price” of gasoline.
No pushback from Cabrera, whose network has pushed the narrative that Biden couldn’t do dang skippy about gas prices. Hochstein went through his White House talking points like a champ, even citing Biden’s raiding of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves like it was a good thing that actually brought prices down.
As we’ve previously reported at PJ Media, gas prices are reportedly likely to increase again and reach new highs before Election Day. Now that the White House is doing a media blitz giving Biden ownership of gas prices, I can’t wait to see what the spin will be when they start going up again.
