Scott Jennings Just Torched CNN and Their Star Kaitlan Collins on Air Over the Network’s Gas Tracker

CNN spent months scaring you about five dollar gas.

Then prices fell and the network's own analyst lit a match.

What Scott Jennings said next left Kaitlan Collins with nothing.

The Moment a CNN Man Turned on CNN

It happened live on the June 25 broadcast of The Source with Kaitlan Collins.

Jennings sat in his usual chair, across from his usual host, on his usual network.

Then he stopped playing along.

"We don't run the gas price tracker on the screen anymore for a reason," he said.

"It's because it's a non-story."

A CNN contributor just told CNN's own audience that CNN buried its own signature feature.

Collins had nothing ready, because there was nothing to say.

Her own employee had just handed viewers the receipt.

Oil is trading at $71 a barrel.

The national average has fallen to $3.86 a gallon as of June 29, down sharply from $4.39 just a month earlier.

CNN ran that gas tracker every single day while prices climbed toward five dollars.

The moment prices started falling, the tracker vanished from the homepage.

WABC Radio flagged April 8 as the last day the page was even updated.

Jennings didn't have to dig that up himself.

He just said it out loud, on the record, with his own bosses watching.

Kaitlan Collins Had Nowhere to Go

Watch what she did instead of answering him.

"The president doesn't think they're a non-story, because he was sounding like President Biden yesterday, saying that these companies are gouging people," Collins said.

That's not a response to what Jennings said.

That's a subject change.

Jennings made a factual claim about his own network's editorial decisions.

Collins answered with a completely different argument about Trump and oil company profits.

The man who exposed her network's editorial call was sitting three feet away from her, and she changed the subject instead.

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CNN Has Run This Play Before

If the pattern feels familiar, it should.

Researchers at the Hoover Institution documented the same trick during the Bush and Obama years.

Under Bush, rising gas prices got tied to his name and his ties to Big Oil in story after story.

Under Obama, the same kind of price spikes got blamed on Iran, China, or global demand — anything but the man in the Oval Office.

A peer-reviewed study tracking more than a million cable and network transcripts from 2004 to 2023 found that television coverage ramps up hard whenever gas crosses $3.50 a gallon, with cable outlets reacting far harder than network news.

CNN didn't invent the move Jennings called out.

CNN just got caught running it again, by one of its own.

The Prediction Jennings Didn't Even Need

CNN's own senior reporter set up the embarrassment weeks before Jennings finished it off.

Matt Egan ran CNN's "Memorial Day sticker shock" coverage in May and quoted GasBuddy's Patrick De Haan predicting the national average would hit $5 a gallon if the Strait of Hormuz stayed closed.

That was May 20.

Five weeks later, gas sits well under $4.

Even at the peak of the Iran conflict, prices never came close to the $5.02 a gallon high logged under Joe Biden — reached without a single missile fired.

CNN had a five dollar prediction from its own handpicked expert and a war for cover.

When the number never showed up, CNN didn't run a correction.

It quietly pulled the tracker and hoped everyone would forget the prediction ever happened.

Jennings made sure they didn't get that luxury.

Why This One Actually Matters

This isn't really a story about gas prices.

It's a story about a major network getting called out for managing its own narrative, live, by a man it pays to sit on its own set.

Jennings didn't need outside reporting or a leaked memo.

He used four sentences and his own network's homepage against it.

CNN spent months sounding the alarm on gas prices under a Republican president.

The instant that alarm stopped serving the story CNN wanted to tell, it disappeared without a word.

One of CNN's own just made sure America saw exactly when, and exactly why.

Sources:

• Joseph Vazquez, "WATCH: Scott Jennings Shreds CNN for Nixing 'On-Screen' Gas Price Tracker as Costs Go South," NewsBusters, June 29, 2026.
• "CNN's Kaitlan Collins Shuts Down Scott Jennings in Debate About Gas Prices," TVInsider, June 26, 2026.
• "Is There a Clearer Case of Media Bias? Gas Prices under Bush and Obama," Hoover Institution.
• "Bad news bias in gasoline price coverage," Briefing Book, May 6, 2024.