For his newest reporting project, CNN anchor and chief domestic correspondent Phil Mattingly spent months traveling the country trying to answer one question: Why do so many Americans feel like they’re financially struggling in an economy that’s supposedly strong at the moment?
The result is CNN’s four-part, multi-platform documentary series Priced Out in America, the reporting of which took Mattingly to Cleveland, Boston, Tampa, and Atlanta. Ahead of the series premiere, Mattingly told me that he actually found a story much bigger and more complicated than inflation as the primary culprit.
Pointing to the disconnect between economic indicators and consumer sentiment, Mattingly said: “The single biggest thing I took away from this project is that you don’t have to reconcile them. Both are true at the same time, and that’s the story.
“The stock market is setting records. Corporate earnings, productivity, consumer spending—all consistently robust. Those numbers aren’t wrong. They’re just increasingly driven by the people doing well, while people of more modest means fall further behind with fewer pathways to the mobility that used to define this economy.”
New CNN series about the cost-of-living crisis
That’s the central idea behind Priced Out in America, which will debut in full on the CNN app on July 16. Through his reporting, Mattingly argues that traditional economic metrics often fail to capture the experience of families whose biggest expenses—things like housing, childcare, and insurance—have continued climbing even as overall inflation has tapered off.
Mattingly built the series around what he calls the economy’s “load-bearing walls.” Each city he visited became a case study of sorts: Cleveland for housing, Boston for childcare, Tampa for the retirement safety net, and Atlanta for what happens when all those factors converge.
The series’ throughline, he told me, isn’t so much a single bill that breaks a family as it is the cumulative weight of several forces simultaneously taking their toll.
“Atlanta crystallized it for me,” Mattingly said. “Headline inflation there is 2.9%. Unemployment is 3.3%. Great numbers. But if you’re a working-class family spending most of what you earn on food, gas, utilities and housing, your real inflation rate this year runs closer to 8%—nearly three times what you hear on the news.
“So when someone in that position hears the economy is strong, it isn’t wrong. But it’s answering a question they didn’t ask.”
‘Nobody has to be told groceries are expensive’
Priced Out in America tells the story of that cost-of-living crisis, and the timing of the series couldn’t be more apt.
The median U.S. home, for example, now costs around $400,000—more than 50% higher than in 2020—while nearly half of renters reportedly spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Add in the rising cost of groceries, healthcare, and other essentials, and it’s easy to see why inflation and high prices continue to dominate Americans’ financial worries.
“Nobody has to be told groceries are expensive,” Mattingly said. “They stand in the checkout line. What they can’t get anywhere is the why. Why the math broke, and who it broke for.”
He recalls driving at one point during his reporting through a blue-collar suburb of Cleveland with a single mother who’d moved into her sister’s basement after her rent nearly doubled while she studied at nursing school. When asked what that financial pressure felt like, she told Mattingly she wanted “the normal American dream” of a house with a picket fence and a yard—but that it now seemed “out of touch, not reality.”
“Watch the tape and you can see a couple seconds of dead air while I sat with that,” Mattingly said. “Jolene and I are the same age, same graduating class, same state—just opposite corners of Ohio. Our lives ran parallel and then split, and I honestly can’t tell you where or why.”
CNN is describing this as a multi-platform series, in the sense that in addition to episodes streaming on the CNN app, there will also be companion CNN reporting plus TV segments, digital video, and social content that amplifies Mattingly’s reporting.
“The affordability crisis is arguably the defining economic story in the country right now, and the people living it cross generational, income, race, gender and geographic lines,” Mattingly said.
“I obviously hope people take the time to watch all four video documentary episodes in full, but if a 90-second vertical … reaches someone on their phone who sees their own life reflected in it, the project is working exactly as intended.”