The Washington Pravda and the Wall Street Izvestia
February 14, 2024·10 comments·In Brief
Leonid Brezhnev “during a festive demonstration on Moscow’s Red Square” (source: Sputnik)
Back in the day, Pravda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party and Izvestia was the official newspaper of the Soviet government. They were, in the lingo of these matters, “organs” of the Soviet Union. Today Pravda is the official newspaper of the Russian Communist Party and Izvestia, self-described as a “Russian national newspaper”, is owned by Gazprom. LOL.
Speaking of the Soviet Union, I’m old enough to remember when a sclerotic and failing Leonid Brezhnev was the perfect symbol of the sclerotic and failing USSR, when the advanced age and decrepitude of Soviet leadership was a global joke. Wanna guess how old Brezhnev is in this photo, taken two years before his death? He’s 73.
Anyhoo …
Last month I wrote a note about media framing of the monthly CPI release. The point was that the Wall Street Izvestia was altering its graphical presentation of CPI reports to encourage the perception that inflation rates were continuing to fall rapidly as opposed to flatlining over the past six months. Money quote from Non-Linguistic Inflation Framing in the Wall Street Journal:
Today both Wall Street and the White House are determined to tell you a story that inflation is over, mission accomplished. Wall Street because they want a cheaper price of money and the White House because they want to win an election.
It’s not a lie, per se, but it’s not a truth, either. It’s all just story, all the way down, not just in their words but in their pictures, too.
For the past year, since March 2023, the WSI has graphically emphasized the core inflation rate, officially because everyone knows that everyone knows that core inflation is what you should really be paying attention to and overall inflation is for chumps, truthfully because core inflation rates have continued to decline since last June and so present a Narrative-appropriate picture, as opposed to overall inflation rates which bottomed out last summer. The presentation emphasizing core inflation looks like this from a month ago, with a dark red line for core inflation and a faint dotted line for overall inflation:
Jan 11, 2024: WSJ – Inflation Edged Up in December After Rapid Cooling Most of 2023
Honestly, I didn’t think that it was possible for the WSI to outdo themselves on this score with yesterday’s coverage of the CPI release, but well … here we are.
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