Not really but if he did you can bet that it’d be big news.

On the other hand our friends at OPEC are talking about just that.

An official within an international oil cartel recently suggested calling an “emergency meeting” to arrange for oil production cuts in an attempt to drive up the price of oil. Although the move follows a smaller production cutback by OPEC member states Venezuela and Nigeria in late September, the mainstream broadcast media have paid little if any attention to the development. 

“We are toying with the idea of an emergency meeting,” Nigerian oil minister Edmund Daukoru was quoted in an October 5 BBC News article, adding that other OPEC members “agree that something needs to be done” to bring up slipping oil prices.

Almost a week earlier, The New York Times’s Jad Mouawad reported in the September 30 paper about the “modest move” by Nigeria and Venezuela to curb oil output. Mouawad reported that oil traders “initially shrugged off” the news but that “contradictory statements from senior OPEC representatives have raised doubts about the oil cartel’s strategy.”

Yet From September 29 through October 5, none of the broadcast networks reported on OPEC’s oil production considerations, and CNN reported on OPEC only once, on the October 3 “Anderson Cooper 360,” according to a Nexis search.

In contrast to its lack of coverage of the oil cartel – of which Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are members – CNN toyed with the idea of a Republican conspiracy to lower gasoline prices at least three times recently.

So the media can report goofy conspiracy theories about Bush controlling the price of gas, but ignore it when the world oil cartel talk about doing just that.  I guess the media trusts Hugo Chavez (Bush is the Devil) and Ahmadinejad (Iran Hostage taker) more than the President.