The Washington Post Grades Biden’s Economy on a Curve

I rarely comment about media bias, but sometimes there is an example that demands attention.

For today’s column, I want to examine a four-question quiz on the Biden economy put together by the Washington Post.

The first indication of bias is that every answer was the one that made Biden look good (or less bad).

Sort of like a quiz asking if communists killed 1 billion people, 500 million people, or 100 million. The fact that the right answer is that they “only” killed 100 million is hardly a ringing endorsement of Marx’s evil ideology.

But another problem is that some of the questions also were steroid-fueled examples of grading on a curve. For instance, based on Question #1, we’re supposed to be impressed that the United States has grown faster than Europe’s decrepit welfare states.

For what it’s worth, growing faster than France, Italy, and Greece is not exactly something to celebrate, as you might imagine.

Question #4 also is designed to make Biden look good by comparing job creation during his tenure to what happened under Trump and Obama.

Yet beating Obama is hardly a major achievement, and the Trump numbers are very distorted because Trump and Fauci shut down the economy during the pandemic.

Biden should have spectacular job numbers, if only because the pandemic meant there were still millions of missing jobs when he took office.

Yet his policies have contributed to relatively weak performance, particularly when looking at labor-force participation.

Suffice to say, Biden would not look good if his job numbers were compared were compared to market-friendly presidents like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

There were two other questions, which also were biased but not to the absurd level as the ones described above.

• Question #2 implies that Biden has done a good job because gas prices have only increased by 75 cents a gallon rather than going up by $1 or $2. Sort of like saying a diet is successful if you’re gaining two pounds a week rather than five pounds.
• Question #3 implies that Biden has done a good job because wages have almost risen as fast as inflation. Needless to say, the fact that there as been zero inflation-adjusted wage growth is actually a damning indictment of Bidenomics.

Here’s how the Post described the quiz.

The past few years have been tumultuous, with a deadly pandemic, a recession, an inflation spike and overseas wars. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Americans give President Biden low marks on the economy. How bad are things? This quiz will help you calibrate your level of concern, and it will show you how your knowledge of economic reality stacks up against other Americans we asked and other Post readers.

The Post obviously wants readers to conclude that Biden deserves good marks for the economy. The fact that the paper had to engage in contortions tells you what you really need to know.

Seems like these cartoons about media bias need to be updated.

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Image credit: Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0.