On September 23, NBC News reporters Rob Wile and Joe Murphy published a piece trying to blame the economy's current turbulence on the Iran war. In doing so, they wrote this sentence: "On Feb. 27, the day before the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the American economy was on a steady course to lower inflation and attain greater buying power. Gas was cheap and interest rates were coming down."
That's NBC News admitting that the economy was fine on February 27, 2026.
The problem is that Trump's tariffs were already in effect on February 27. They'd been in effect for months. Every tariff NBC had spent the previous year warning would crater the American economy was already baked into the numbers when Wile and Murphy described the economy as humming along with cheap gas and falling inflation.
The CPI sat at 2.4% on February 27, according to NBC's own reporting. Today it's 3.4% — a full percentage point higher. Wile and Murphy attribute the shift entirely to the Iran war: "When it comes to the U.S. economy, there's before the Iran war — and since." That framing works only if you forget everything NBC said about tariffs for the preceding twelve months.
And NBC said a lot. In August 2025, the network warned that "analysts say the latest report on the costs businesses face suggests consumers won't be left unscathed for long." In May 2025, tariff-driven price hikes. In April 2025, recession risks. In July 2025, Goldman Sachs concerns. Month after month, the same prediction: tariffs would break the economy.
Then February 27 arrived. Tariffs fully operational. Economy on "a steady course." Gas "cheap." Inflation falling.
The five-month average inflation rate from March through July 2026 — the Iran war period — hit 3.6%. That's not great. But for context, the five-month average from March through July 2022, under the Biden administration with no war and no tariffs, was 8.6%. NBC didn't run twelve months of apocalyptic coverage over 8.6% Biden-era inflation. They reserved the panic for 3.6% during a shooting war.
Gas prices tell a similar story. Regular unleaded is approaching $4.50 a gallon today, driven largely by oil disruptions from the Iran conflict. Under Biden, it hit $5.02 per gallon on June 14, 2022 — no war required. Diesel set a record at $6.52. Oil stayed above $100 a barrel for 84 days under Biden and 308 days under Obama. Under Trump, across both terms combined, the total is 24 days — all of them after the Iran strikes.
The Wile and Murphy piece was supposed to be an indictment of wartime economics. Instead it became a timestamp. NBC News, in its own words, confirmed that every tariff scare segment it aired through 2025 was contradicted by the data as of the day before the war started.
Nobody at 30 Rock caught it before publication. The sentence sits there in the middle of the article, surrounded by paragraphs blaming the war for inflation, quietly undercutting a year of network programming.
The CPI was 2.4%. The tariffs were in place. Gas was cheap. NBC wrote it down.