Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has blamed the media for rising inflation, after the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged him to control surging prices, a press report said Tuesday.

"A wave of propaganda created by national and non-national media in the past months has played up the issue of rising prices," Ahmadinejad said in a cabinet meeting, cited by Aftab-e Yazd daily.

These media "have sought to portray the government as incapable as if it had been supposed to reduce the inflation [rate] to zero percent within a year," he said. "Inflation had always existed and it had even risen by 50 percent under previous governments."

Prompted by surging prices for staples in the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Khamenei urged the government to control inflation. "In the last weeks, the issue of high prices has put a lot of pressure on people, especially low-income ones. So the government and officials should look into the causes of the issue and solve it," Khamenei said earlier this month.

The official rate of inflation stands at an average of just over 10 percent, but unofficial sources estimate that the figure is close to double that rate.

The prices of staples such as meat and chicken have surged in recent weeks, sparking complaints by Iranian families and getting front-page coverage in the press.

Ahmadinejad said that the extermination of millions of chickens in a bid to fend off bird flu in February was the reason for rising meat and poultry prices.

Ahmadinejad was elected on a platform of delivering the oil riches of OPEC's number-two exporter to the people but economists have warned expansionist economic and monetary policies risk fueling inflation.

A group of leading university academics wrote in a letter printed in the Iranian press in June that Ahmadinejad's economic policies were "lacking a scientific and expert basis" and risked causing "persistent inflation."

Thanks again to our correspondent "Irrational Exuberance."