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USA Today Falsely Claims
‘Record Price’ of Gasoline
But years ago when prices climbed, the
media sometimes adjusted for inflation to show gas prices weren’t
really all that high.
By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
June 7, 2006
Either “It’s All Been Done” by the Barenaked Ladies or
The Four Tops’ “Same Old Song” could be the soundtrack for the
media’s recurring errors in gas price reporting. But CNN sang a
different tune when rising gas prices were in the news near the end
of the Clinton presidency, allowing an adjustment for inflation to
put prices in perspective.
“Although gasoline prices will likely dip a bit in the
near-term, families hitting the road this summer will still pay
record prices at the pump,” wrote USA Today’s Barbara Hagenbaugh in
the
June 7 paper,
becoming the latest reporter to sing the media’s refrain on gas
prices.
That expected “record” price, “2.76 a gallon over the
April-September summer period” is less than last year’s post-Katrina
high of $3.07-a-gallon and, when adjusted for inflation, comes far
short of the $3.12-a-gallon that motorists would have to pay to meet
the record set in 1981.
Even if you take out volatile price spikes to look at a
running weekly average, the expected average price runs 18 cents shy
of the inflation-adjusted annual average of $2.94 during gas
shortages in 1980, according to
inflationdata.com.
The media haven’t always done a bad job on this issue.
Six years ago, when a CNN poll found “two out of every five
Americans” finding gas prices to be a “hardship,” that network’s Web
page posted a story putting prices in perspective.
Asking if gas prices were “really that high,” in an
article posted on March 14, 2000, CNN staff writers noted that the
“average price of gasoline now is up to $1.54, higher than the $1.38
average in 1981. But that 1981 price of $1.38 translates to $2.29.”
In short, concluded the report, “Current gasoline
prices are not at record levels, not even close.” What’s more, the
fact that “Americans keep buying gas-guzzling automobiles” would
seem to argue that “gas prices are not that high after all.”
The Business & Media Institute has
written on the media’s faulty coverage of
oil
and gasoline prices, even extending well before Hurricane Katrina’s
impact on the
oil market.
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