It is the media’s fault

The so-called liberal media that unwittingly helped to elect Donald Trump now seems poised to help reelect him.

Remember the CNN news ticker endlessly harping on Hillary Clinton’s emails? Remember the false equivalencies between Trump’s mountain of lies and Clinton’s molehill of exaggerations? It’s not just Fox bombarding us with stories obsessing over inflation and suggesting the President is out of touch with people. CNN and even The New York Times have joined the chorus.

At the same time, there’s little coverage of the remarkable job Biden’s administration has done to restore the health of the country and the economy since he was inaugurated during the worst public health crisis in a century and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

As a result, a recent poll reported 63% of Americans believe Biden has accomplished “little or nothing” or “not much” in 10 months. Really? Nearly 6 million of the 9.5 million jobs lost last year have been restored, unemployment has fallen from 6.3% to 4.2%, and GDP growth was estimated to hit 5.5% for the year 2021.

Inflation is a problem, but the bigger problem is that the media coverage has largely involved shrieking headlines and cherry-picked human-interest stories with very little context or analysis. The principal driver of inflation is the surge in demand that accompanied reopening of the economy and caused supply chain bottlenecks. Biden cannot be blamed for that and he deserves credit for the underlying economic recovery.

Finally, although inflation has proved more intractable than anticipated, it has been accompanied by wage increases and a 5.9% increase in Social Security payments, softening the impact. Those increases will remain once inflation has abated.

Michael Cantwell, Delray Beach