Hundreds of people sent it in, but nobody sent it to Ethics Alarms. Come one, you guys, I’m depending on you!
That clip above, in which CNN’s supposed stat guru Harry Enten deliberately (or impossibly incompetently) misinterprets a Fox News poll about what proportion of Americans think prices are higher than a year ago for various consumer products as showing how much prices have risen for those products. Nobody in the segment pointed the error out. Nobody screamed from off-camera. There has been no CNN correction or retraction.
Enten, in his usual hyperactive mode, said, “I mean, your costs are up vs a year ago!” and begins underlining to the products and reads the percentages aloud, implying costs are up by that much. Then he says, “The bottom line is this: Americans feel prices are rising in every single part of their lives”—implying that they “feel” it because just look at how much those prices are rising!—“rising ever higher and they just don’t feel like, Kate Balduan, that they can catch a break.” Well, how could they? Just look at those percentages!
Are Americans so clueless that they would believe this nonsense? Apparently the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the news media (“the Axis of Unethical Conduct” ) think so, or they wouldn’t try to get away with it every day, all over the news media. The Biden administration goofs its way into a period of 9% inflation, prices soar, the rate of inflation comes down dramatically in the Trump Administration but the same party responsible for raising the prices uses the inevitable fact that they aren’t coming down (prices as a whole never come down, they just go up more slowly) as proof that the current administration is failing. Yes, Trump shares some blame for this by saying that he would bring prices down during his campaign. He was being his usual careless talk self and meant (I guess) that he would bring some prices down, but as usual his habitual hyperbole got him into trouble. That error does not excuse lies like Enten’s, however.
If CNN was a real practitioner of journalism, which it is not (I don’t think there is a single trustworthy news organization anywhere today), Enten would have used the Fox News poll the way it was explained on Fox: to show the large gap between the reality of U.S. prices and the public perception of it, in part because of Axis lies. To take one obvious example, gasoline is down from a year ago and anyone who drives a car knows it. But Enten implied that the cost of gas is up “54%”!
How many outrageous examples of “the dishonest waiter” phenomenon and flagrant news media efforts to deceive the public does the public need to have them conclude that the U.S. is undergoing an existential effort to confuse and mislead the public so that a crypto-totalitarian party can grab it by its metaphorical throat? Commenters still come on Ethics Alarms—I can think of one erudite and respected one in particular—to claim, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” Leftist pundits and elected officials still attack President Trump by saying that he calls the news media “the enemy of the people,” as if he’s wrong. That characterization in his first Inaugural address remains one of the most accurate and important statements he has ever made, the equivalent of President Reagan calling the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” (The U.S. Left attacked Reagan for that harsh truth-telling as well.)
Just when I think the latest news media gaslighting exercise has hit rock bottom, I find that it has been drilling deeper. Between indoctrination in the schools and manipulated information from the “enemy of the people,” responsible civic engagement by Americans is becoming nearly impossible. All people like me can do is to try to keep the truth out there and make the case that those deliberately obscuring it to gain power need to be exposed, disgraced, shunned and rejected.
Yet in order to do that, I find myself saying the same thing over and over, boring not just the five regular visitors here but myself. I don’t know what else to do.
Ethics Alarms 
I have to wonder if part of the problem isn’t an actual dearth of competency out there. There are many, many people who can copy, mimic, read a script, follow simple instructions, and the like. But in my increasing experience, there are not that many people who have the depth of knowledge and expertise to know why you follow these instructions, what goes wrong when you don’t, how to manage if you have to go off-script, or have to start from scratch on something. This includes being able to look at data and have the capability of recognizing if the numbers simply aren’t right.
An 84% increase in groceries would mean groceries are nearly double the cost, and unless one is completely clueless about the cost of groceries, one should be able to recognize that the actual sticker price of groceries has not exploded that much in one year. If one has been paying attention at all to how grocery prices have increased since 2020, one would know that estimates put the cost increase in that 5 year period at something like 28%. So alarm bells should have rung at the idea that grocery costs increased 84% in one year. That they didn’t could be malice, which I’m more than willing to believe, but it could be that these people truly don’t understand the data they are looking at.
Now, I’ve taken the time to look up Harry Enten’s biography and work history. He worked for FiveThirtyEight under Nate Silver for a number of years, was known by the moniker “Whiz Kid”, and graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in Government. He supposedly is a big numbers reporter, and I would have typically agreed with that given his work at FiveThirtyEight and his current role on CNN. But is it possible that his expertise is only skin deep? Has he been riding on an undeserved reputation that has now been revealed by this serious a gaffe? Or is this blatant malice on his part, and he’s able to get away with it because no one else has the competency to gainsay him?
I saw the Fox segment with the sound down and interpreted the graphic as prices rose that much a not what % of respondents think prices are up.
I knew this was Bullshit and ignored it.
This is a great opportunity for Trump or his allies to point out how factually false this CNN presentation was and undermine all their reports
But the news media won’t report what’s being pointed out, and Trump’s ALL CAPS ranting on Truth Social calling for CNN to be banned or Harry Enten to be tarred and feathered won’t help.
I wonder about whether the influence of Main Stream Media and newspapers have been declining in the last decade in favor of other media such as YouTube TikTok, especially among the younger generation. Maybe the attention we pay to CNN at Ethics Alarms is a reflection of boomer bias. Or maybe I am just to jaded.
CNN viewership (actually watching the channel — looking at clips posted on X doesn’t count) has plummeted as part of the larger collapse of people watching television news. Among mainstream media, Fox News has held up better than its competitors, but the overall trend is clear — people are abandoning cable in favor of streaming services.
Here’s an overview of the trend:
https://www.americantv.com/broadcast-tv-hits-historical-viewership-low-in-june.php
I used to peruse CNN on-line, but last year they put paywalls on most of their digital stories, so I abandoned that practice then. I still check the Reuters site regularly (no paywall), usually on my phone.
Useful overview summary:
“Prime-time slots, historically the stronghold of broadcast networks, offer a stark look at the decline. In June 2024, total viewership for the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) between 8–11 PM fell by 11% year-over-year. Compare that to June 2019, when the same block drew roughly twice the audience. This drop isn’t erratic—it’s cumulative. Season-to-season comparisons show downward shifts in both reach and engagement, without exception across genres.”
I can confirm. As an older Millennial (or younger Gen X’er, depending on how one figures), the times I hear what’s happening on CNN or is when an anchor makes the wall of shame on ethicsalarms.com.
I have a different take on the segment. I watched the entire Enten performance and it’s pretty clear by the end he’s giving the numbers from a poll that shows those percentages are the percentage of people who think those various price categories have gone up. They are not the percentage increase of those price categories. Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s a complete whiff by CNN and Enten. (I have to admit, as goofy as his mannerisms are, I kind of like Enten.)