The study, conducted by Singer and Abla Abdulkadir, found that corporate news outlets tended “to attribute industry price hikes to factors beyond the control of the sellers in that industry.” The report noted that many of the articles examined failed to cite impartial experts or note that the stock markets experienced high returns during the years companies were raising prices.
The study examined business reporting by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist, Politico, the Financial Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Axios from January 2023 to the present. It found that on average, roughly 60 percent of the articles blamed price hikes on factors outside companies’ control rather than profit motives.
Axios led the pack with 100 percent of its articles ignoring greedflation as a possible cause, followed by CNBC with 73 percent of its coverage neglecting to mention corporate incentives for price hikes. Coming in third was the Washington Post, owned by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, with 65 percent of its articles failing to mention that companies might have a hand in raising prices.
In 2023, there were more than 308,000 PR specialists nationwide, compared to just 49,800 reporters, according to government data.
In fact, as the country has been mired in inflation spikes since the pandemic, corporate profits have skyrocketed. From 2010 to 2019, corporate profits accounted for roughly 14 percent of the total national income. In the fourth quarter of 2024, those profits had increased to more than 16 percent of the nation’s income, according to a Federal Reserve branch study released in April.
Since the pandemic, many experts have warned about the effects of greedflation, which is when corporations engage in “profiteering by hiking their prices at rates much higher than annual inflation rates.” But the corporate press largely downplayed those concerns. The Washington Post called greedflation a “conspiracy theory” on par with conservatives falsely claiming that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin was a cure for COVID-19.
In August 14, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal agency tasked with monitoring workforce and economic trends, found that inflation rose nearly 1 percent in July, and 3.3 percent over the past year. It was “the largest 12-month increase since rising 3.4 percent in February 2025,” the bureau noted.
The bureau’s report also found that overall food prices rose 4.2 percent from July 2024, with vegetable prices jumping 36.3 percent, beef prices rising 9.9 percent, pork up 4.7 percent, and coffee prices up nearly 30 percent.