Sean Hannity, per usual, had some critical words for Joe Biden on his show Tuesday night on Fox News. Unfortunately his criticisms came with a side of extremely inaccurate information.
Hannity was complaining about the rise in gasoline prices, and during this segment he rolled out a graph purporting to show just how drastic the rise in prices has been since Biden assumed office. Alas, it was not accurate.
According to the graph Hannity showed, gasoline averaged $1.50 per gallon nationally in December 2020 and January 2021, before Biden took office and it continued to its current national average of more than four dollars per gallon.
You can see that graph at the top of the page now, or watch the segment a little further down the page.
Of course, gas most definitely did not average $1.50 per gallon before Biden took office. The full-year national average for 2020 was approximately $2.17 per gallon, though that low price was obviously a by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic. For those curious, the lowest gas-per-gallon price was $1.77, which happened in April 2020, just after the severe contraction of the U.S. economy at the start of the pandemic.
And in December 2020? It was $2.24 per gallon, down a full dollar from 2019 (again for obvious, pandemic reasons). Meanwhile, in January 2021, most of which contained Donald Trump’s final weeks in office, the national average price per gallon was $2.42.
Now obviously there has been a big rise in prices in the last year and change. People of good faith can debate why that is or isn’t. Inaccurate graphs containing false information don’t help though. Luckily someone on Hannity’s show realized a correction was in order and so Hannity delivered it at the end along with a brief apology — albeit without clearly explaining what the error actually was.
Hopefully Hannity’s fans notice the accurate chart and don’t force their kids or whoever to debunk the inaccurate chart over Thanksgiving dinner later this year.