Don’t believe your lying eyes! CNN tried every narrative trick in the book to pre-spin the blockbuster June inflation numbers before anybody even knew what the data was going to say.
The typical CNN Business culprits — Senior Writer Alicia Wallace and Senior Reporter David Goldman — released a so-called “analysis” July 13 on the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly report on consumer prices, which was released a day later. “Don’t be fooled: America’s inflation problems aren’t going away anytime soon,” read their obnoxious headline.
Despite acknowledging the June numbers could signal an easing on inflationary pressures, Wallace and Goldman concocted their predictable flapdoodle to project disaster anyway, “but that doesn’t mean the inflation resurgence is over: Prices could keep rising uncomfortably for years.”
The official BLS inflation data released after Wallace and Goldman’s piece went live showed that consumer prices actually declined 0.4 percent on the month and eased to a 3.5 percent rate on the year. That crushed consensus estimates by Dow Jones economists for a 0.2 percent decline on the month and a slight ease to a 3.8 percent year-over-year rate from the 4.2 percent high in May. The monthly decline was the sharpest in six years. On a yearly basis, inflation in fact cooled a whopping 0.7 percentage points, both figures in effect rendering Wallace and Goldman’s premature obfuscations to the contrary appear downright idiotic.
What kind of “analysis” was this anyway? What exactly were Wallace and Goldman analyzing? This is like a food critic blaming a restaurant’s shrimp cocktail for giving him stomach cramps despite never eating it in the first place. Wallace and Goldman dismissed the expected inflation cooling cold turkey as just being driven by volatile drops in energy. “But stripping away volatile oil prices, the inflation picture isn’t looking quite so rosy.” Yes, the supposed analysts tried to determine the core inflation metrics prima facie:
“But a drop in energy costs doesn’t magically erase price hikes already set into motion by the previous surge in oil and fuel prices or the constricted supply of critical materials like fertilizer and metals.”
But Wallace and Goldman whiffed here too. Despite projecting that core inflation would remain in the “uncomfortable” 2.9 percent territory from May “for a while,” the metric per BLS actually cooled to a 2.6 percent rate, reflecting an ease in inflation pressure not necessarily manipulated by volatile fluctuations in the food and energy sectors. It’s pretty rich seeing Goldman kvetch about unreliable energy metrics when he tried using a single snapshotted Brent Crude futures chart in May to predict that we wouldn’t see $70 a barrel oil prices again until 2032 if the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz ensues. Apparently oil price projections are only reliable when convenient to however CNN chooses to spin a story on a given day.
Read Full Article: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/business/joseph-vazquez/2026/07/14/dont-be-fooled-cnns-pitiful-attempt-pre-spin-inflation
