Media committed to its narrative of doom under Biden

Recently we learned that President Donald Trump was, in effect, the Typhoid Mary of the COVID-19 epidemic during the 2020 campaign. What’s more, unlike the original, a cook who unknowingly infected whole families in early 20thcentury New York, Trump tested positive for COVID but didn’t bother to warn any of the individuals he came into close contact with before himself being hospitalized.

So was Trump deliberately trying to infect Joe Biden at their first presidential debate? Nobody knows. You will remember that the entire Trump family showed up unmasked in defiance of agreed-upon rules. Five of the six people who helped Trump rehearse came down with COVID, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who almost died and who blames Trump for infecting him.

Elsewhere, a 38-page PowerPoint presentation detailing a scheme to steal the 2020 presidential election was inadvertently turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who subsequently developed an acute case of “executive privilege” lockjaw. The idea was that Trump would declare a national emergency and seize voting machines on the baseless grounds that Chinese hackers had corrupted them.

Yet what was the big political news story of the week? Why, the rising cost of milk and gasoline, of course. Last week’s announcement of a 6.8% increase in inflation over the past year provoked semi-hysterical coverage reinforcing the media narrative that terrible economic conditions had the Biden White House reeling. On his PRESS RUN website, media critic Eric Boehlert details what he characterizes as a Washington press corps “married to a Biden Doomsday storyline.”

We have seen this movie before: an allegedly even-handed establishment press succumbing to feverish gang coverage of stories that never add up. Remember Hillary Clinton’s emails? The great Whitewater scandal? The 2000 “War on Gore”? Selling Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent

weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invading Iraq would also qualify.

CNN recently found a family it portrayed as driven to near penury by rising milk prices. Supposedly, the cost of a gallon had risen from $1.99 to $2.79 where they live. That’s a 40% increase. According to the Consumer Price Index, milk has risen 4% over the past year. This too: The family reported buying 12 gallons a week — enough to bottle-feed several calves. (Granted, it was a large family.) Even so, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, milk hasn’t cost less than $2 a gallon since the turn of the century. CNN’s story had no basis in reality.

Not to be outdone, The New York Times profiled a New Jersey man whining about the rising cost of gasoline for his Cadillac Escalade. That SUV retails for around $80,000. So I suspect the story subject may be laying it on a bit thick when he reports working 15 hours overtime every week to gas up the behemoth.

So here’s a Times story from April 2020 detailing an “unprecedented” agreement between the Trump administration and its pals in Saudi Arabia and Russia for “the largest [oil] production cut ever negotiated” for the express purpose of driving up prices and increasing energy industry profits.

“Oil prices spike by a record 25% as Trump talks up huge production cuts,” was how CNN headlined the story.

Like most Trump schemes, it failed due to the pandemic. Today, however, OPEC is sharply increasing production. Prices are dropping.

But until they do, it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.