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Wait, Oil Prices Dropped This Year? When Was the MSM Going To Tell Me?

Jimmie | December 23, 2008 | Comments (0)

Oh, yeah. That’s right. Never.

The MSM reporting, especially television reporting, of gas prices was horrid this year? According to the Business & Media Institute’s Dan Gainor, stories about the energy crisis were inaccurate, predictions were wildly wrong, and good news was rarely reported. Not only did all of the television networks predicted long-term wrack and ruin almost every time they looked into their crystal balls, but none of them save ABC bothered to acknowledge that they had made any mistakes at all. The reporting was so bad that Gainor was forced to conclude, “[t]he bottom line was troubling: the “news” media had no understanding of the oil industry, period”.

Of course bad news sells, and gas prices throughout the first half of the year proved a gold mine for bad news. But, as you’d expect, when prices started to drop precipitously, news coverage dropped in half. That’s common practice for news networks but it’s not something we should tolerate. If the MSM wants to be seen as trusted sources of information, then they have to report the good news with the bad. As Gainor points out, if the economic impact of $4 gasoline was serious enough to report, then the positive impact of $1.60 gas is equally serious. A $100 billion savings due to the drastic decrease in oil prices is big news, and the MSM missed it almost entirely.

This last little bit amused me as well. I took a little victory lap after I read it.

Did President George Bush help spur the huge drop in oil and gas prices? We might never know. But here are the facts. Bush had argued for increased domestic oil production, though he got nowhere with Congress. On July 14, Bush issued an executive order ending the prohibition against offshore drilling

Oil closed at $145 that day and promptly started dropping. In a week, $14 had been shaved from the cost of a barrel. In two weeks, that rose to $20. By the presidential election, oil had fallen more than 50 percent and was still dropping, to end close to $50 a barrel by Nov. 30 – a 66-percent decrease.

Only GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain credited Bush with any impact on prices. On the July 23 CBS “Evening News,” McCain said the Bush plan was a success. “The president of the United States announced that we would be – a week or so ago – that we would be lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling. The price of oil dropped $10.”

Journalists ignored it. Out of 548 stories, no journalist credited the Bush move with a positive impact on prices.

Not everyone ignored it. Maybe I should be working for a big-time media outlet. It seems that I see the stories they don’t.

Oh, I also noted that while the President was taking action to bring down oil prices, the Democratic party’s strategy was being described by a Dem Congressional aide as “Drive small cars and wait for the wind”. That’s another story that was generally ignored by the MSM.

It’s almost like there was some sort of political motivation behind what stories did and did not get reported this past election year.

I don’t know which would be worse – that the MSM is incompetent or that they’re obviously biased. Whichever is true, it led to some very bad reporting this year.