Progress Illinois

When Josh caught Reps. Peter Roskam and John Shimkus greatly exaggerating the amount of oil available on the Outer Continental Shelf ( a main plank of their VISION Energy Act), I chalked it up as a cynical political maneuver. But maybe I was wrong. Perhaps the Republicans overlooked the Energy Information Agency's assessment because the results never showed up on their TVs.

In an instructive study on the media's coverage of the offshore oil drilling debate, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains why so many Americans think offshore oil drilling will lower the nation's fuel prices:

[The study] finds that these broadcasts almost completely ignored data, and conclusions, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency (EIA). The EIA finds that the benefits from such drilling would be too small to have a significant effect on the price of oil. There is no legitimate reason for this omission in the media. Just as economic reporting regularly uses data (unemployment, inflation, GDP, trade) from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or Bureau of Labor Statistics, reporting on energy relies on data from the EIA.