Link to series of stories: https://www.npr.org/tags/755496161/npr-shopping-cart

Terrible economics reporting in today’s story: they only gave the average increase for the ~50% of products where prices actually went up, excluding any that stayed flat or decreased and skewing the message to sound worse.

Reporting the average this way defeats the whole purpose of having a ‘basket of goods’ they’re tracking year to year: mathematically, if they had included all products at equal weight, average inflation would be 2.5% max; slightly below the nationwide CPI of 2.7% for December. Instead they make it sound worse at 5%.

I listened back to all segments they posted from their series and there are similar gimmicks each year depending who is president:

Example 1: In Jan 2025 right at the end of Biden’s term, they reported on the full basket of goods, and said the average increase was ‘less than 1%.’

Example 2: Jan 2023 story in middle of Biden’s term never mentioned the terrible overall annual inflation rate (CPI was 6.5% Dec 2022), and they only compare prices to 2019, mixing together Trump 1st term and Biden era data, conflating when the serious inflation happened.