A Just the News news writer wrote that [p]ositive US economic indicators have been left out of much of the mainstream media’s reporting on the state of the economy.
He’s right—the mainstream media really is that mendaciously biased. His claim, though, also is wholly irrelevant in the present election season.
All those economically favorable data that the news media studiously ignores are aggregated data; they refer to the nation and not to any particular individual, not even to any small groups of people in local communities.
Folks don’t care that, as a nation, inflation is down sharply from the Biden years or the nation’s median household income has risen to nearly $87,500. Who is this Mr/Ms Median Household person, anyway? Has anyone actually met him or her? Nor do folks care that the nation‘s jobs data are favorable.
What an individual—a voter—cares about is that he’s personally paying gas prices that are up 30-40 percent over the pre-Biden years; he, the trucker, is personally paying diesel prices that are up nearly double; her grocery bills at the local grocery store are up 40-50 percent; his/her income—what he or she gets in an actual take home paycheck—doesn’t stretch to pay those higher costs. It’s not that he notices that his take home pay isn’t growing enough to keep up with inflation—generally he doesn’t. Nor does he need to, what he sees is that his paycheck no longer covers his gas, groceries, utility bills, and on and on. That’s if the individual has a job at all, which personal datum is invisible in those aggregated statistics. He’s just a depersoned number in the collection of labor statistics.
What are politicians, especially Republican politicians, going to do about that? This is what, so far.
Republicans are going to be swept into oblivion next month if they don’t stop hiding under their desks avoiding these simple facts and get out among their constituents—diners, rec centers, town halls, letters to local editors, interviews on local television and radio stations—and say, in so many words, what their particular policies are that will address their constituents’ particular cost of living concerns.
Being specific is the bane of politicians, exposing them as specifics do, to broad criticism and sharp opprobrium. It’s time now, though, for Republicans to find some backbone and be specific, which, as a happy side effect, would let them point out the failure of their opponents to have any sort of plan for these ills other than that they’re not Trump and they’re not Republicans.