The Patriot Post® · Economy Stumbles, Media to Blame

Joe Biden was right.

Come again? you’re thinking.

Asked about the recent jobs report and why the vast majority of Americans still “don’t fee positive or feel good news about the economy,” Biden blamed media negativity.

“I’d — look — I got to choose my words here,” he said before a long pause. “You all are not the happiest people in the world — what you report. And I mean it sincerely. It gets a more little — you get more legs when you’re reporting something that’s negative. I don’t mean — I don’t mean you’re picking on me or I’m — just the nature of things. You turn on the television, and there’s not a whole lot about ‘boy saves dog as he swims in the lake.’ You know? To say — you know, it’s about, you know, ‘somebody pushed the dog in a lake.’”

Biden getting pissy with the liberal media even after a softball from Darlene Superville – an AP reporter who pens one love letter after another for this WH – is just too much. pic.twitter.com/kgvLFfo8cQ

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) October 6, 2023

To translate his rambly garble, Biden is right to point out that media outlets thrive on bad news. That’s largely because news consumers pay a lot more attention to bad news than they do good news. Good news doesn’t get clicks or eyeballs. Bad news hauls in the advertising dollars.

But Joe Biden was also wrong, and hilariously so.

“I think that the American people are smart as hell in knowing what their interests are. I think they know they’re better off financially than they were before. It’s a fact.”

Given that approximately 81 million* Americans voted for Biden, the “smart as hell” part might be an open question. However, he’s most certainly wrong about people knowing they’re supposedly “better off financially” under his administration. Even most of his voters aren’t that dumb.

It’s true, not every metric in the economy is awful. Headline unemployment is historically low, for example. But it’s utterly ridiculous to blame the media for not gaslighting the American people, for not circling the wagons with fake news about prosperity brought by Bidenomics.

Cumulative inflation since Biden took office is 17%, though that’s not an accurate measure of things most of us need and buy. Homeowners insurance, our Thomas Gallatin tells us today, is up 35% in the last two years. Food, gas, autos, and houses — they’re all up much more than 17%.

But Patriot Post readers know that all too well. So do most Americans, 84% of whom realize their cost of living is going up. Way up.

No, the point of this story is to rebut the silly assertion that Americans just don’t know any better because the media simply isn’t going to bat for Biden.

We recalled seeing numerous articles in recent months expressing bewilderment at negative views about Biden’s fantastically awesome economy. Sure enough, it took about two minutes to conduct a Google search and come up with a few of them.

“Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy?” wondered infamous New York Times economist Paul Krugman in May. “You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid,” he wrote. “On the other hand…”

“Why aren’t Americans happier about the economy?” asked former Bill Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich in The Guardian in July. He blamed class envy for why Americans just don’t realize “the economy is getting better overall.”

“The Biden economy is strong,” asserted MSNBC propagandist Chris Hayes, also in July. “Why don’t voters agree?” He insisted, “We have a lot of data showing that our economy is doing really well.”

In August, Fortune ran a paywalled explainer on “why the economy feels so bad when experts say it’s so good.” We decided it wasn’t worth $1 for a trial subscription to read it.

And in September, CNN’s Allison Morrow explained “why Biden’s strong economy feels so bad to most Americans.”

Again, that was just a cursory Google search. It says nothing of the hours of cable TV, left-wing podcasts, and myriad other forms of communication from the media telling us (falsely) that everything’s just dandy with Uncle Joe steering the good ship USS Economy. The Leftmedia is a super PAC for Democrats, lying to the American people all day, every day in service to the agenda.

So take heart — in spite of that, the vast majority of Americans know the truth, whether Biden likes it not.