NPR Tells Listeners Not to Give Biden Credit for Falling Gas Prices, Even When its Story Effectively Does

October 27, 2022

I’m not kidding, it literally began a piece on falling gas prices by telling listeners:

 “Gas prices are falling, but don’t give credit to Biden.”

Obviously, there are many factors that affect gas prices, but one of them was President Biden’s decision several months ago to release oil from the country’s strategic petroleum reserves. The piece effectively acknowledges this fact even as it was telling listeners not to give Biden credit.

Here’s a chunk of the segment:

“CHANG: [Show host Aisla Chang] Interesting. OK. But President Biden made a big speech about gas prices, and he announced, like, another release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. Did that actually help push prices down, too?

DOMONOSKE: [NPR reporter Camila Domonoske] Yeah. This latest announcement, it was really more of an update about the decision that was announced months ago. There wasn’t any new oil involved. Here’s Patrick De Haan from the price tracking app GasBuddy.

PATRICK DE HAAN: [expert with price tracking app GasBuddy] Because it wasn’t a new announcement. The market had been expecting that. It’s really not moving the needle.”

The gist of this brief exchange is that Biden’s latest announcement that he was releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves was not lowering prices because he had earlier committed himself to this release.

Okay, so De Haan is actually quite explicitly saying that Biden’s release of oil from the reserves is lowering prices. He was just saying that his latest announcement did not have an effect because the markets already expected this release.

That means in reality land, Biden does deserve credit for falling gas prices, even if NPR doesn’t want its listeners to give him credit.

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