Topic: CNSNews.com
Biased CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones began a Nov. 23 article by bashing President Biden's decision to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, scoffing that it "may lower fuel prices just a little for a short time." Then she served as a stenographer for Donald Trump:
But former President Donald Trump, who returned the Petroleum Reserve to full capacity, issued a statement condemning the move:
"For decades our Country’s very important Strategic Oil Reserves were low or virtually empty in that no President wanted to pay the price of filling them up. I filled them up three years ago, right to the top, when oil prices were very low," Trump said:
Trump is lying -- the SPR was not "low or virtually empty"; in fact, it was more than 80 percent full at the the time Trump authorized filling it further. The SPR holds a maximum of 727 million barrels of oil, and Trump's authorization was for 77 million barrels. At the time, oil prices had cratered due to the pandemic, so it didn't exactly require an act of political courage on Trump's part to do that, despite his suggestion otherwise. Even then, it took months to obtain the oil for the SPR, in part because oil producers opted to cut production rather than feed a market in which oil prices had actually gone negative due to plummeting demand.
Jones went on to uncritically quote Trump:
Those reserves are meant to be used for serious emergencies, like war, and nothing else. Now I understand that Joe Biden will be announcing an “attack” on the newly brimming Strategic Oil Reserves so that he could get the close to record-setting high oil prices artificially lowered.
We were energy independent one year ago, now we are at the mercy of OPEC, gasoline is selling for $7 in parts of California, going up all over the Country, and they are taking oil from our Strategic Reserves. Is this any way to run a Country?
Jones didn't mention that Trump signed a bill in 2018 that mandated the sale of 100 million barrels of oil from the SPR by 2027 to fund the government -- which runs counterfactually to his claim that the SPR whould be reserved only for "serious emergencies, like war, and nothing else."
This is just another example of CNS giving Trump a pass for repeating falsehoods, even as it nitpicks President Biden for any possible misstatement.
UPDATE: Oh, and Trump's reference to gas "selling for $7 in parts of California"? That appears to be referring only to a single station in one California town that can get away with gouging consumers because it's the only station in the immediate area. The average price of gas in the state is around $4 a gallon.
