This is another reason why the AP basically sucks as an organization. It homogenizes coverage, and when they have a bias, it pervades a ginormous swath of media. Having worked as part of a news organization, the AP “brand” carries a lot of weight in news rooms. Their style guide dictates the proper terminology for different concepts. Editors facing a discrepancy between AP copy and some other source will choose the AP copy in ambiguous cases. All of this gives them a unique ability to shape coverage. So, mistakes like the one outlined in the linked article are more egregious than they seem. AP has been particularly bad in their political coverage. This article is just the latest in a series of basically factual sloppiness going back to the Nedra Pickler articles during the 2004 election.
Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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