As CBS and NBC evening newscasts ignored dropping gas prices on July 23, ABC's Charles Gibson found a way to provide negative spin.
"News today in this country, that gas guzzling is getting cheaper while coffee guzzling gets more expensive. The price of gas took a dive in the past week. The government says it was down nine cents a gallon, to an average of $2.96," Gibson said on "World News with Charles Gibson."
But the cost of an optional Starbucks latte has nothing to do with gasoline. Still, Gibson oddly correlated the nine-cent price drop per gallon of gas since last week with the nine-cent price increase at the popular coffee joint.
At least Gibson admitted the news wasn't all that bad: "It's raising the price of a cup of coffee by that amount [nine cents], a net gain for the consumer, since you don't have to buy 20 gallons of Starbucks."
But this isn't the first time ABC overshadowed gas price decreases with the increasing cost of something else. It hyped rising dairy costs on June 27.
The three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, are often quick to point out any rise in gas prices, but sometimes reluctant to report a drop in gas prices. Gas price decreases immediately before the Memorial Day holiday went largely unnoticed by those networks.
