Last week, Mediaite attempted to call out Fox News guest host Joey Jones for mocking MSNBC host Chris Hayes after Hayes used a recent Politico article to boast about Joe Biden’s “historic” accomplishments while in office.
During his show last Tuesday, Hayes was defending President Biden’s accomplishments since taking office. At one point, Hayes cited Politico’s analysis of Labor Department data which claimed that pandemic-era government spending is the reason wages increased among lower-income workers even after inflation.
On Wednesday’s broadcast of “Fox News Tonight,” guest host Joey Jones accused Chris Hayes and MSNBC of “unfiltered propaganda.” He played a clip of Hayes crowing about the analysis in the Politico article. Jones told viewers that the clip was not a skit from Saturday Night Live but “was real.”
Jones then interviewed Fox Business host Bryan Brenberg who said Hayes failed to provide any evidence to back up Politico’s analysis.
Brenberg noted that Hayes was simply reading a “political article” instead of interviewing people “who are living the reality right now.” He asked if the lower-income Americans are seeing the wage gains that Politico wrote about.
Brenberg said the wage gains in the labor market are happening in the leisure and hospitality sectors, not because of pandemic-era government spending, but due to a labor shortage. He added that while these workers might be seeing some wage gains, people in lower income brackets get hit hardest by inflation “because when you’re at the bottom, you can’t trade down.”
The data provided by the Department of Labor was based on worker surveys on the economy rather than hard numbers.
The purpose of the Politico article was to warn against the debt ceiling deal between President Biden and House Republicans which includes rolling back some of the pandemic-related spending that caused inflation to skyrocket. In that sense, Fox News is correct. The Politico “analysis” is politically-motivated propaganda designed to protect the very government spending that sent inflation through the roof.
