Palin told her Facebook fans that 'even humble folks like me can read the newspaper.' Palin's fact check gets fact-checked

Sarah Palin took aim at the Wall Street Journal on Monday, asserting that a reporter’s fact checks of her speech failed to recognize some of the paper’s own reporting – but it appears she misfired.

In a speech Monday criticizing the Federal Reserve's decision to pump $600 billion, Palin warned that the move could prompt rapid inflation for goods such as groceries, saying that "prices have risen significantly over the past year or so."


Following the speech, the Journal’s Sudeep Reddy expressed doubts about the claim in a blog about Palin’s “largely conventional critique.”

“Palin tries to draw the concerns about quantitative easing to inflation today and falls short,” Reddy wrote. “Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact. The consumer price index’s measure of food and beverages for the first nine months of this year showed average annual inflation of less than 0.6%, the slowest pace on record.”

Palin responded in a Facebook post linking to a November 4 story in the Journal with the headline “Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices.”

“Ever since 2008, people seem inordinately interested in my reading habits. Among various newspapers, magazines, and local Alaskan papers, I read the Wall Street Journal,” Palin wrote in her post. “So, imagine my dismay when I read an article by Sudeep Reddy in today’s Wall Street Journal criticizing the fact that I mentioned inflation in my comments about QE2 in a speech this morning before a trade-association.”

Palin pointed to a section of the November 4 story that, according to her post, reads “an inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants…Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months.”

But the Columbia Journalism Review later noted that the excerpt Palin highlighted actually reported that food prices may only be beginning to rise, counter to Palin’s assertion that prices had already gone up.

Palin’s post uses ellipses to remove a crucial portion, as the actual section reads: “An inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants, threatening to end the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.”

In response to Palin, Reddy wrote that Monday’s post examined Palin’s assertion “that grocery prices ‘have risen significantly over the past year or so.’”

“That view is not supported by the facts,” Reddy wrote.

“While some items in the shopping cart have risen in price (ground chuck beef is up 4.8%) and others have decreased (bananas are down 5.3%), overall food price inflation has been historically low for the past year,” he added. “This is not surprising. Weak demand, high unemployment and thrifty shoppers have led retailers to keep many prices from rising despite the rising cost of some commodities, including coffee and sugar.”

A Palin spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.