The legacy media has a memory problem, or so argues Terry O’Brien in a new column for American Thinker. His target is the coverage of grocery prices, and his charge is straightforward: the same outlets that once warned, at length, that pandemic-era shocks would push food costs upward for years are now pinning those costs on President Trump and his tariff policies, without acknowledging their own earlier reporting.
O’Brien frames the piece as a do-it-yourself act of journalism. After a recent trip to the store, he says he set out to test the story he was hearing on television against the story he remembered being told just a few years earlier. What he found, he writes, was a gap between the structural explanations offered by agricultural economists and supply chain experts during the immediate post-pandemic recovery and the political explanations dominating today’s coverage.
The old story versus the new one
According to the column, “three, four and even five years ago” economists, agricultural experts and international institutions repeatedly cautioned that disruptions to farming infrastructure and global logistics would create long-term upward pressure on food prices. O’Brien points to rising input costs — energy and fertilizer chief among them — as the mechanism. Those costs, the argument goes, work their way through the system slowly, taking years to show up fully at the retail level.
He lists the elements of that pre-existing account: soaring natural gas prices, historic spikes in fertilizer costs, farm labor shortages and bottlenecks in global shipping. None of these, he writes, were presented at the time as temporary inconveniences. They were described as fundamental fractures in the food production system whose consequences would arrive later, and inevitably, on grocery shelves.
Then the prices came. And according to O’Brien, the coverage changed shape. Instead of tracing the increases back to the multi-year trends experts had flagged, he says much of the press attributed them to the sitting administration — to tariffs, to executive action, to geopolitical friction tied to Trump. The pivot, in his telling, is not a matter of interpretation but of amnesia: outlets ignoring their own prior coverage to land on a simpler, more partisan explanation.
What the column says the press is avoiding
The core of O’Brien’s complaint is about effort. Explaining a slow-moving agricultural crisis, he writes, requires real work — researching how a shortage of nitrogen or phosphorus fertilizer years ago affects today’s crop yields, or how energy policy across multiple administrations shapes the cost of moving food from field to supermarket. That kind of reporting demands economic literacy and a willingness to walk audiences through complicated, gradual global realities.
What it doesn’t demand is the news cycle. O’Brien argues that many outlets find it far more convenient to weaponize the immediate political moment, converting a sprawling infrastructure problem into a single talking point directed at the current president. The result, he writes, is reporting that satisfies the appetite for quick, polarizing content while leaving the public fundamentally misinformed about what actually drives prices.
He is careful, at least rhetorically, to make this a critique of method rather than merely of conclusions. When news organizations prioritize political finger-pointing over investigative diligence, he writes, they fail at their core responsibility to deliver an objective and comprehensive account of events. The phrase he uses is “narrative enforcement” — a preference for the story over the facts.
That framing places the column within a long-running conservative argument about media incentives, and O’Brien makes the accusation in explicitly partisan terms. CNN, ABC, CBS and the rest, he writes, do not care about reporting facts; their purpose, in his words, is to elect Democrats. He describes the food price story as one of “scores” of important topics that have met the same fate. The outlets named in the column, it should be noted, have not been given an opportunity to respond to this characterization here, and the piece does not cite specific segments or articles to support the claim of a coordinated pivot.
A personal remedy and a political one
The column’s closing move is prescriptive, and it is aimed at readers rather than editors. O’Brien compares the situation to a personal one: what do you do, he asks, when someone in your life lies to you persistently? His answer is that you probably remove that person from your life. Applied to media, the recommendation is to watch and read “only real news” — a category the column leaves for the reader to define.
From there he shifts to electoral advice. In the midterm elections, he urges readers to give Trump the Republican Congress he needs to address the underlying problems, a line that treats the food price debate less as an argument to be won than as a turnout prompt. It is a familiar ending for opinion writing of this type, and it sits somewhat awkwardly beside the column’s earlier insistence on rigorous, evidence-based explanation. The piece does not lay out which specific policies a Republican Congress would pursue on fertilizer, energy or logistics costs, nor does it quantify how much of current grocery inflation it attributes to pre-Trump factors versus tariffs.
What the column gets right, and what it leaves open
The underlying media criticism is not baseless on its face. Supply chain economists did spend much of 2021 through 2023 warning that food inflation would be sticky, driven by energy, fertilizer, labor and shipping costs that predated any single administration’s trade policy. It is a legitimate question whether that body of reporting has been adequately reflected in coverage of current price levels, and O’Brien is entitled to ask it.
Where the column is thinner is in the proof. It asserts a coordinated suppression of context without citing particular broadcasts, articles or studies, and it does not attempt to weigh the relative contribution of tariffs against the structural factors it identifies — a calculation that is genuinely contested among economists and that would strengthen the argument considerably. The leap from “this context is underreported” to “these outlets exist to elect Democrats” is asserted rather than demonstrated.
Still, the piece raises a question that transcends its partisan packaging: when a crisis is years in the making, does the press have an obligation to keep the old warnings in view, or is it enough to report the latest cause? O’Brien’s answer is unambiguous. Whether readers accept his remedy — changing the channel, and changing Congress — is another matter, and one the midterms will presumably help settle.
For now, the column stands as a representative sample of a durable genre: the media critique written from inside a partisan fight, using a real analytical point as its opening and an electoral ask as its close. The food price story, whatever its causes, is unlikely to be resolved by either.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/high-food-prices-and-fake-news/