Days after spinning June’s strong jobs report as “America’s employment crisis,” Fox News is now concerned that the month-long drop in sky-high fuel costs could potentially be a bad thing for “mom-and-pop gas stations.”
As gas prices surged during the first half of the year, Fox News relentlessly blamed the White House for the increased pain at the pump, claiming it was due to President Joe Biden deliberately harming the oil industry and his decision to shut down the uncompleted Keystone XL pipeline. (The actual reasons for the sharp increase were, of course, a bit more complicated.)
While the network was all over the price increases, it was slow to acknowledge the steady price drop at the pump over the past month. According to both GasBuddy and the American Automobile Association, the price average national price of a gallon of regular unleaded gas has dropped nearly 40 cents since hitting its peak of $5.02.
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During Monday’s broadcast of America Reports, co-anchor John Roberts finally broke the news to Fox News viewers that the price of gas was “creeping back down” near his home. His colleague Sandra Smith, however, suggested that this may not be entirely a good thing.
“It is. It is,” she noted. “And the point was made over the weekend, I believe it was the Wall Street Journal, that gas prices are actually coming back down historically faster with the price of oil than usual.”
Smith continued: “And it just goes to show you what an incredible risk-reward calculation has to happen on the part of those small—independently owned, most of them—mom-and-pop gas stations. It’s a struggle for all of them!”
The WSJ article that Smith referenced reported that gasoline prices quickly falling is “creating new headaches for the mom-and-pop entrepreneurs and other independent operators who run roughly half of U.S. gas stations,” adding that station owners risk “losing money on every new fuel order” they place.
Roberts, for his part, noted that “we’re still a long way from $3.55 a gallon” but that perhaps the nation is starting to “move in that direction.”
Smith’s gas commentary came just a week after she and fellow Fox anchor Charles Payne took Vice-President Kamala Harris to task for seemingly laughing off the “gas price crisis.”
