In an absurd essay, a new Washington Post columnist claims the rise of Politico caused our mainstream media to become too tough on Democrats and too easy on Republicans.
Perry Bacon, Jr., who joined the paper in May, after working at far-left MSNBC and TheGrio, wrote 1,500 words on “How the rise of Politico shifted political journalism off course.” He believes Politico’s method is “obsessed with not offending Republican readers.” Yes, left-leaning, D.C.-based Politico.
Bacon, whose bio says “Republicans are moving in an anti-democratic direction,” rants about the press being “wary of angering Republican readers” so they “refused to cast the GOP as drifting into radical and racist behavior.”
“The election of Barack Obama looked like it could usher in a politics that was less divisive than George W. Bush’s presidency and a full break from the conflicts over race and identity that had in many ways defined U.S. politics since the 1960s,” Bacon writes quixotically. “But early in the Obama years, it became clear that the fights of the past weren’t over; they were, instead, perhaps becoming even more tense. The most important stories in American politics were the deepening polarization of the American electorate along cultural and racial lines and the growing radicalization of the GOP.”
Cultural perhaps, but racial? Only when you’re desperate to find it.
Recommended: ‘The Threat Will Be So Large’: Lindsey Graham Says Biden’s Decisions Will Force U.S. Back to Afghanistan
Bacon adds, “So the press spent much of the Obama years acting as if the opposition to him was solely because he had a liberal policy ideas on issues such as health care and not because Obama had become both the leader and a symbol of a multicultural America whose values are opposed by many on the right.”
Actually, Obamacare and his catastrophic foreign policy were the primary criticisms of every conservative I know.
Political media had “little racial diversity among journalists; and a White-centric news approach; an obsession with placating Republicans who cast the media as too liberal,” Bacon continues in his whining on race in the world’s most multi-cultural nation.
Bacon then claims Donald Trump’s presidency augmented these media maladies, focusing on race again.
“Trump pushed White identity politics with anti-democratic tactics from the moment he entered office to the moment he left,” Bacon believes, offering scant evidence. “There was more coverage of the attempts by Republicans to make it harder to vote and more direct and blunt reporting on Trump’s racist actions and words. This was in part because news outlets had hired more reporters of color, an acknowledgment that more racially diverse staffs would cover the story of American politics better and that these outlets had previously steered away from hiring reporters of color whose frank coverage of the racist elements of the GOP might annoy Republican readers.”
Better journalism due directly to the race of a reporter? Also, Republicans are not making it harder to vote, but alas, how about media during the Biden administration?
“While there were problems with the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the wall-to-wall, highly negative reporting on it also reflects the press’s eagerness to demonstrate it will cover him as critically as it did Trump,” Bacon says, without irony that he’s appalled at balanced coverage on one issue. “Congressional Republicans’ criticism of Biden’s policies continues to be treated sincerely — without frontally acknowledging that most of them insincerely objected to allowing Biden to become president in the first place, based on allegations of widespread voting irregularities.”
A total non sequitur. Again, conservatives are not concerned with race — the party’s 2016 and 2024 options are more diverse than Democrat leadership — or looking back, but rather with awful policies hurting America.
Bacon is surely a naïve radical, but scanning nearly 1,200 comments, he knows how to placate the paper’s overwhelmingly white, insular, upper-middle-class readership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member