The Washington Post wants voters to believe that grocery stores, not President Joe Biden’s inflationary policies, are to blame for Americans’ continued concern about rising food prices.
For three years, the propaganda press joined the Biden administration in lying about the nation’s sticker shock. They claimed inflation, which hasn’t dropped below zero percent since Biden took office, is “cooling,” “falling,” and lightening voters’ financial loads.
It wasn’t until 2024, when President Joe Biden’s years-long poor performance started hurting his standing in national presidential polls, that corporate media started reporting on how perpetually high prices affect families at the grocery store.
“Inflation has fallen. Why are groceries still so expensive?” Washington Post authors Jeff Stein and Abha Bhattarai wondered in a headline on Friday.
The Washington Post considers “labor shortages” and “ongoing supply chain disruptions” due to prolonged government-mandated lockdowns, “droughts,” “avian flu,” and even Americans’ “demand for food” as culprits for expensive shopping trips.
“At the same time, demand for food — particularly meat, nuts and fresh produce — has remained elevated, as Americans splurge on higher-quality specialty goods and organic items, according to Thilmany, of Colorado State University. Households are generally allocating more to groceries than they were before the pandemic, even after accounting for inflation, in part because their buying habits have changed, she said,” the article states.
You read that right. According to the experts and the propaganda press outlets willing to amplify them, inflation is your fault.
During an appearance on MSNBC, Stein credited routine economic interruptions like natural disasters and international conflict for the record-breaking jump in prices since 2020. Yet, in both text and on TV, he refused to acknowledge Biden’s inflationary policies or the several trillion dollar Democrat spending sprees he signed into action.
Instead, Stein and his coauthor continued to carry water for the Biden administration. They published excuses from White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa, who called for continued pressure on corporations to eat their costs to give consumers a break.
“The Administration is cracking down on exploitative and anti-competitive behavior in meat and poultry markets, supporting state law enforcement efforts to stop practices that raise food prices, and pursuing all available avenues to lower grocery prices for families,” Kikukawa claimed.
Stein and Bhattarai also repeated claims from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, without link or written evidence, that “grocery store profit margins remain higher than their pre-pandemic levels.”
After hearing from several troubled voters that they might reject Biden in the voting booth come November due to their grocery bills, the article’s authors rushed to assert that former President Donald Trump was somehow “policies are poised to make grocery prices higher, not lower.”
“The former president is campaigning on placing new tariffs on trillions of dollars of imports and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, which would likely make costs significantly higher for domestic beef, chicken and dairy products,” they noted.
The corporate media campaign to cover for Biden comes mere days after the Democrat president publicly accused grocery chains of exploiting Americans’ economic woes.
“But for all we’ve done to bring prices down, there are still too many corporations in America ripping people off: price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation,” Biden said during a campaign event in South Carolina in January.
Heading into the 2024 election season, the corporate media’s message on inflation is clear. It’s everyone else’s fault — especially your own — that food prices remain high. But Biden, who Republicans and Democrats both have explicitly linked to inflation in polls, is never to blame.
