To hear Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon tell it, Joe Biden’s low approval ratings aren’t due to his ludicrous policies, his failed leadership, or his cockamamie worldview.
Joe Biden isn’t very popular because of the way the mainstream media is covering him.
The lack of self-awareness notwithstanding, Bacon blames the media because its “flawed coverage model of politics and government is bad for more than just Biden — it results in a distorted national discourse that weakens our democracy. The media needs to find a different way to cover Washington.”
Get that? Biden’s unpopularity is a structural problem with the media that has nothing to do with politics or policy.
It all started during the withdrawal fiasco from Afghanistan.
Biden’s poll numbers plunged, closely tracking the media hysteria. As The Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in December, data analysis showed a marked increase in negativity in media coverage of Biden that started last August. After the withdrawal, the media lumped other events into its “Biden is struggling” narrative: infighting among Democrats over the party’s agenda, Democrats’ weak performances in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, rising inflation, and the surge of the delta and omicron variants. Biden’s role in these issues was often exaggerated — there are many causes of inflation besides Biden’s policies; presidents can’t stop the emergence of coronavirus variants. This anti-Biden coverage pattern remains in place.
Bacon mentions Dana Milbank — the previous winner of the “Blame anyone or anything but Biden” award. Milbank’s entry was titled “The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.” Not much proof was forthcoming because apparently, Milbank thought most of the criticism of Trump was true and deserved.
Naturally, neither of these gentlemen blamed the media for hysterically exaggerating actions that Trump took when he was president. Bacon actually says the media is committed to “equal coverage of both parties.”
And in my view, media coverage is a big factor in those warped polling results. Media commitment to “equal” coverage of both parties has resulted in a year and a half of coverage since Biden entered office that implies both parties are similarly bad, as if the surge of inflation and some of Biden’s policy mistakes rival a Republican Party that is actively undermining democracy in numerous ways, such as continuing to voice baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, passing measures making it harder to vote, and gerrymandering so aggressively in states such as Wisconsin that elections are effectively meaningless.
In fact, the problem is that the media is just too darn fair.
Also, the media’s “equally positive and negative to both sides” approach has been challenged by the increasingly radical and antidemocratic Republican Party. Honest coverage of political news often seems anti-GOP. The mainstream media covered Trump very harshly, particularly in the final months of his presidency as he worked to overturn election results. Some journalists, consciously or unconsciously, were poised to “balance” that negative Trump coverage with criticism of Biden, even if his actions weren’t nearly as deserving of condemnation. In the post-Trump era, leaders at CNN, the New York Times and other major outlets have emphasized that they don’t want to be perceived as more aligned with the Democrats.
It wasn’t just the “final months” of Trump’s presidency that saw the media being “harsh” to him. From the day he announced his candidacy in 2015, the media has been critical of his every move. It takes a special kind of ignorance to overlook history in order to fashion a narrative so at odds with reality.
The media has been hysterically anti-GOP since the 1970s. And they were saying the same thing back then. “It’s not that we’re unfair, it’s that the GOP is so awful and evil that we have to report on it, so it just comes out as ‘anti-GOP.'”
Is that why voters keep electing “evil” Republicans?
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