Either way, Rampell’s bias towards BigBusiness is clear.
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Catherine Rampell’s penchant for business boosterism is on full display once again. Having already run cover for a variety of corporate giants including in the fast food and retail industries, The Washington Post reporter recently decided that BigPharma was next in line for some free PR.
In her New Year’s Eve column, Rampell speculated on some of the ways in which widespread usage of GLP-1 receptor agonists—a class of drug which includes increasingly popular weight loss medications like Zepbound (manufactured by Eli Lilly), Ozempic, and Wegovy (both manufactured by Novo Nordisk)—could impact the economy.
Setting aside the fact that glowing write-ups of corporations have become a running theme in Rampell’s column, the real hackery is how Rampell’s enthusiasm towards corporate solutions contrasts her hostility to policy that curbs corporate power.
For all her optimism about this technology, Rampell acknowledges in the very beginning of her piece that “even experts don’t entirely understand how it works, its full range of uses and what its unintended consequences could be.”
Yet the picture she paints of how these drugs will “disrupt the economy” is rather positive: households could save more by spending less on groceries and labor markets stand to benefit from an ostensibly healthier population. (It’s worth noting that the evidence Rampell used to support the latter claim was an assertion that individuals would have the energy to pick up second jobs because they lost a significant amount of weight. Whether it’s a good idea to view the path to prosperity as people simply working more should raise some eyebrows, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Yet, when Rampell attempted to predict the impacts of a national ban on price gouging for food and groceries—the precedent for which already exists at the state level—the only outcomes she foresaw were “shortages, black markets and hoarding,” as well as potential increases in prices.
That Rampell seems more willing to entertain the possibility of airline passengers “slim[ming] down en masse” enough to cut fuel costs, while simultaneously dismissing the reality of seller’s inflation, speaks volumes about her brand of “data driven journalism.”
We’ve called out a lack of nutrition in Rampell’s reporting before—multipletimes—and will continue to do so so long as she continues to deliver a menu of ostensibly overlooked corporate heroes and purportedly meddlesome regulations.