From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. The credit crisis, foreclosures, the weak dollar, inflation.

The headlines this week were dominated by the economy.

Amid all the turmoil, the part of the story most obvious to most Americans is the price of oil,

and more particularly, the price of gasoline at the pump.

The media therefore have spent a lot of time dealing with the oil price bubble, often framing it as an issue of supply and demand.

First of all, from economics, we know that there's supply and demand.

We are not going to solve the oil problem without dealing with both the supply

problem, which means drilling and demand for energy prices. We can't do much in the near term

about supply. We can do a lot about the demand. A bigger collapse in demand and we'll see lower

prices for sure. It's down $18. Why? It all comes down to the basic law of supply and demand.

But Howell Raines, media columnist for Portfolio Magazine and former executive editor for the New York Times,

says journalists generally haven't been asking the right questions about oil prices.

The oil companies have gotten away with a very simplistic explanation that this is purely supply

and demand and they cast themselves as helpless victims of supply and demand. We have a supply

crunch because of a calculated decision on their part to, one, cut back on exploration, two,

close half of the refineries that we had only a few years ago,

and three, to redirect all of their spending from things like research and development into profits.

So none of these things are unpredictable or accidental.

Now, in your piece in portfolio, you portray us as kind of unwitting victims to the superior

public relations tactics of the oil companies in particular.

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