May’s inflation report is eggscellent news — unless you work in journalism.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics April consumer price index released Wednesday notes: “Driven primarily by a 12.7-percent decrease in the index for eggs, the index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs fell 1.6 percent in April after rising in recent months.”
Donald Trump pointed to this drop throughout April, but his Fourth Estate antagonists called it a lie. It turns out that they allowed their animus for the president to overwhelm their professional obligation to pursue the truth. They wonder why Americans increasingly turn away from old-guard media sources.
As recently as the last day in April — when the price of a carton of large eggs decreased by more than a dollar within the month — ABC News posted an article with this headline: “Trump says egg prices are falling. Some experts say the claim is misleading.” The article maintained that experts say that “his assessment of egg prices is potentially misleading.” Instead of caution, the “some experts” and “potentially misleading” highlights calculation in the network’s intent to mislead.
Egg prices were falling, and falling in an eggstreme manner. How could they not notice?
On April 24, FactCheck.org labeled Trump’s claims on falling egg prices as “false.” A post claimed, “Several times over the last week, President Donald Trump has assured Americans that the prices of eggs and gasoline are down significantly. But he has made false claims about the cost of both products.”
It’s all so eggsasperating.
A CNN headline from a day earlier read: “Fact check: Trump lies about the price of eggs, groceries and gas.”
Now CNN pivots in a way that contradicts their recent article (without acknowledging it) while still managing to depict the president of the United States as a liar. CNN’s Wednesday headline, “Trump’s egg price fiction has suddenly become reality,” falls into that category of “premature antifascist” or “fake but accurate.”
Rather than admit that Donald Trump noticed something that statistics only now caught up to, CNN uses the dramatic decline in egg prices to say that Trump, who has been in office for less than four months in this iteration of his presidency, was actually wrong on the decline of egg prices.
It all recalls another instance of journalistic malpractice 33 years ago in which left-wing journalists distorted a supermarket story involving a Republican president for political effect.
Remember when the New York Times mocked George H. W. Bush in an article headlined “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed”? The newspaper made it seem as though an out-of-touch Bush, who had been vice president and president for the previous 11 years, did not know what a checkout-line scanner was.
The Associated Press later wrote a corrective piece that highlighted that the president didn’t express amazement at any ordinary checkout-line scanner but one that weighed produce and featured other hi-tech wizardry (at least by 1992 standards) shown to him at a dog-and-pony-style trade show.
Back then, the press mocked a Republican president as ignorant of what the plebians see weekly in the supermarket. This go-round, the press mocked a Republican president but in doing so displayed their ignorance of the happenings inside supermarkets.
Journalists, again, wipe egg off their faces. They must be eggshausted by now.