A media ecosystem wired for Republicans

This may seem like a small thing, and by itself it is, but it’s symptomatic of something that’s a very big deal. Here’s the lede to Even the Liberal CNN’s report on the unexpectedly strong GDP numbers this morning:

The US economy picked up steam in the second quarter despite punishing rate hikes and still-high inflation.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, grew by an annualized, seasonally adjusted 2.4% rate in the April-through-June period, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. That was a faster pace than in the first three months of the year and was also above economists’ expectations for a 1.8% rate, according to Refinitiv. GDP is also adjusted for inflation.

If you go the hyperlink regarding “still-high inflation,” you’ll get a report that year over year inflation as of last month was 3%. This is below the median and way below the average annual inflation rate for the last 60 years, so “still-high” would only be accurate if US economic history started in 2011.

What’s notable here is the completely reflexive way in which the legacy media treats economic news if a Democrat is president. I would bet a lot of internet dollars that there’s no way this story would have been framed in this way with a sober, fiscally responsible president like Donald Trump in office, because for one thing Trump would have sent out ten thousand tweets about how inflation was now at the lowest point it had been in all of recorded history, and economists were coming to him with tears in their eyes and asking him how he had done it.

The larger point is that is kind of subtle but insidious conservative media bias is everywhere, and especially in regard to anything touching on the economy, where no amount of evidence can dislodge the meme that Democrats are trying to set up a Swedish-style welfare state, while Republicans are sober-minded accountant types. And that semi-unconscious assumption leads to this kind of thing, repeated endlessly, everywhere.