You have to almost admire the chutzpah of the mainstream media: they’re not just lying to us; they’re admitting they’re lying. Right to our faces – and expecting we won’t notice. They really think we’re that stupid and gullible.
The examples of the MSM turning on a dime are legion. The latest comes from USAID’s biggest dependent, Politico.
Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.
And Politico was right there with them, huffing and puffing in outrage that the economy was doing fine. How dare those right-wing echo chambers tell such lies about the thriving Biden economy!
President Joe Biden is running out of the tools – and the time – he needs to turn around Americans’ gloomy view of the US economy.
On Friday, the nation got the latest sign that it’s in a sustained economic upswing, adding 272,000 jobs in May. But the surprise show of labor market strength is unlikely to sway a downcast public fixated on rising prices, the cost of housing and high interest rates.
Naturally, they wielded their favourite bludgeon: misinformation!
“If half of the people think that unemployment is at a 50-year high when it’s actually close to a 50-year low, this is a problem of misinformation, it’s a problem of perception,” said Ben Harris, a former senior Treasury Department official who helped craft Biden’s economic agenda. “I think, unfortunately, it’ll have a major impact on the election.”
Biden has already spent months touting the nation’s record jobs boom and steady wage gains.
Only now, Politico is admitting that those wicked right-wing echo chambers were right, all along.
What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality? […]
The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics.
And so, by implication, were the ‘right-wing echo chambers’. Not the MSM. Well, fancy that.
Perhaps the most prominent issue of the 2024 campaign – inflation – tracks much the same story. Democrats spent much of the campaign pointing out that inflation had abated by Election Day, even if prices remained elevated from pre-pandemic levels.
In other words, inflation was high, it just wasn’t as high as it had been under Biden – and it was still higher than it was under the first Trump administration.
What we have here is a collection of economic indicators that all point in the same misleading direction. They all shroud the reality faced by middle- and lower-income households […]
In an age where faith in institutions of all sorts is in free fall, Americans are perpetually told, per a classic quote from former Sen Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that while we may be entitled to our own opinions, we aren’t entitled to our own facts.
Except that what the MSM and the Democrats were touting as ‘facts’ clearly weren’t. Who are voters going to believe? The media, or their lyin’ eyes?
