I & I Editorial BoardThis week, Reuters ran a story headlined: “Average price of gasoline during Trump’s term now exceeds Biden’s, as midterms loom.”
It’s false, which Reuters itself admits in the same story. But who cares what the truth is, so long as it hurts Donald Trump?
At the top of the report, Reuters says “The price of a gallon of regular gasoline has averaged $3.472 since Trump took office almost two years ago, edging out the $3.471-per-gallon average for Biden’s term, according to data from the AAA.”
CNN and other news outlets ran the same story.
But there’s a big, hairy, audacious problem with those numbers. They don’t take inflation into account, which is the only way to make meaningful price comparisons over several years.
What happens when you do that?
We got monthly gasoline price data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Like AAA, it shows that the average nominal price of gasoline is a tiny bit higher so far under Trump II than it was under Biden — $3.451 vs. $3.446.
But account for inflation, and you get the opposite answer. The average inflation-adjusted price for gasoline under Biden was $3.89 a gallon. So far in Trump’s second term, prices have averaged $3.52 a gallon.
That means the average real price for gasoline under Trump is 10% below what it was under Biden.
Incredibly, Reuters admits that its headline is bogus, but only for those readers who make it past the sensational opening paragraphs.
“Sticky inflation makes nominal price comparisons misleading,” the story eventually says.
Then it quotes Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, who told Reuters that, “adjusting for inflation … Americans are still not paying record amounts of their income on filling up their tanks.”
In other words, the premise of the article is wrong. But instead of changing the headline, it buried that fact.
So, the real news here is that, despite all the hue and cry about the Iran war and the cost of gasoline, Americans are still paying less to fill up than they were under Joe Biden. But Reuters can’t report that, because it might help Trump.
This is the world we live in. One in which “journalists” don’t see their jobs as providing the facts, upon which Americans can draw their own conclusions, but rather as being flacks for Democrats, even if it means bending the facts and twisting the truth.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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