Introduction to my First Proper Diary
First time diary writer (generic ideological introduction aside), long-time DKos reader here! Fair warning I am a verbose writer who likes run-on sentences and parenthetical statements and in this diary I wound up building up to my point with a wind-up long enough to rip an MLB pitcher’s arm clean out of its socket, but I’ll attempt to spoil the outcome by saying that this diary is about how blatant and intellectually vapid the bothsiderism of the mainstream media is re: the 2024 US elections, made ever more apparent following the excellent recent SOTU with focus predominantly on articles posted on The Guardian’s US website, and how right we are to continue to press the fourth estate to shape up and stop putting equal weight in unequal truths.
Thank you in advance for reading, if you choose to. Whatever comments you may have, critical or otherwise, I ask for the understanding that I wrote, reviewed, and posted this in good faith to contribute my part to the contemporary progressive discourse.
I aim to be accurate and fair while asking for forgiveness for rhetorical imprecision or differences in perspective. While I try to support my position well with links, quotes, and referring to other ideas or news stories, total thoroughness is beyond my patience, and I wanted to have some fun putting my own voice into this as well. I tried to find a balance between putting time and care into this while not taking so long it lost its contemporaneousness or consumed an inordinate amount of my time and energy (as it is this is the most effort I’ve put into putting my thoughts in order in a presentable way in a long time, and was a good exercise for me!) Thank you for your understanding!
to Start to Get to the Point – Biden Good, Trump Bad, MEDIA UNSURE
Aside from a limited number of criticisms that are beyond the scope of this diary, I am a big fan and supporter of President Joe Biden who I view as likely the best president we’ve had since the 1960s, potentially back to Eisenhower or FDR. He’s gotten a lot of practical progressive reforms done in a divided government under the cloud of a culture wherein a significant minority of the populace have bought into the big lie that he illegally won a legitimate election and is somehow a threat to America when he is actually an effective servant leader who has nearly always served the office with grace, candor, humility, and decency. Whatever tantrums my inner political child may have over our differences in some ideal world we’ll never know, in the real world he is a good man and a great president, this much is clear to me.
Like many of you, I’ve been following the travesty of the New York Times bias, flawed polling, and the continued thumb-pushing on the scales by multiple news outlets to benefit the political right for years now. Not to a degree that I mean to be totally fatalistic or conspirational, (don’t attribute to malice that which is attributable to ignorance, don’t attribute to conspiracy that which is attributable to human nature running its banal course, and don’t be surprised at how ignorant and self-serving someone can remain when faced with truthful information that seems bad for their bottom line or status) but I see things with a “probability cloud” mind that understands shades of gray, and the shades of our political media landscape are often failing to contextualize the gravity of our actual political reality heading into November 2024. Instead the media uses its headlines and leading paragraphs to beat down an overall good President Biden and give pass after pass to a horrendously flawed former President Trump under the cover of some sort of ‘responsible’ balance.
Somewhat against my habit, as I prefer to make decisions based on outcomes instead of words and therefore tend to view political speeches as hot air even at the best of times, I wound up watching a significant portion of the State of the Union. I was absolutely impressed with Joe Biden’s performance, and instantly found it a virtually flawless rebuttal in both delivery and content to the criticisms of the right, the critical elements of the left, the disgruntled independents, and the bothsiderist media all at once. Which is not to say anyone should expect all minds to be changed, but it was a significant and helpful step toward a democratic future for our country and DKos rightly picked up on it and fanned the justified flames of good news and good vibes! But I was quickly disappointed how it was covered elsewhere…
The Way MSM Contextualizes Biden
On MSNBC the next afternoon I would’ve hoped to see the media pick up on Biden’s performance but the first news I saw was a chyron saying “BIDEN SAYS ‘ILLEGALS’ DURING SOTU, IS SORRY” or similar with multiple talking heads yammering how it’s a problem without pointing out that Donald Trump has effectively been quoting Adolf Hitler translated into English for years on end, and is Biden’s opponent and therefore his alternative. A lack of context. The Guardian similarly had that as a major headline front and center on their main site the next day. To be fair, MSNBC also dedicated a lot of its coverage to how well Biden did, while The Guardian ran articles saying it was a good performance. But a diary about bothsiderism wouldn’t be about bothsiderism if the media wasn’t weighing positive, actual news and information equally against negative distractions and warpings of reality! Which is what we’re seeing the media do.
Here I shift gears to focus on some examples from The Guardian US’s website since SOTU:
- “Joe Biden Has Come Out fighting. But He’ll Need More Than Grit To Defeat Trump Now” by Jonathan Freedland. First thing it does is undermine Biden’s great speech by saying “he needed to come off as not doddering; he cleared the bar” as if to wave away that achievement that the media has been egging him on to achieve for months. As if that’s not important anymore, which I view as a media ‘goal-post move’ in the opening paragraph. Followed by ‘Trump is the nominee, guys’ (uh yeah we saw that one coming), the courts aren’t going to stop him (yeah we hoped but did we expect? The left has been pragmatic for ages that this is about the election, even if some dared to cross our fingers for a legal remedy; why shouldn’t we hope for our country to legally bar a wannabe dictator from becoming the dictator he wants to be? Are we wrong for that?). Then talk about bad polls showing Trump leading, while ignoring how systematically wrong polls in the US has been for several election cycles now, and how Democrats are repeatedly outperforming them, and Trump has been underperforming his in the primaries. Just ‘Democrats should be nervous’ talk based on bunk information and old assumptions. At least the piece settles into a belief that Biden can and should win, but that lede is fully buried by then, the headwinds keep getting overstated and Trump’s viability overstated while missing ample opportunity to factually and correctly criticize Trump.
-The “Biden Says Illegals During SOTU” article (originally from The Associated Press) frames it as “Biden regretted saying illegal while Trump, his certain opponent (again, they keep ramming this point home like it’s some sort of shock to anyone) blasted Biden’s immigration policies and blamed them for Riley’s death” without noting that Trump’s immigration policies are terrible, have lead to a 3200% increase in drowning deaths at the Texas-Mexico border, he’s constantly racially motivated and frequently apes the rhetoric of Nazis, often translated directly; he uses misinformation constantly, and immigrants to this country commit violent crimes at a lower rates than native-born citizens. To say nothing about how basically all mass shootings in America are committed by white men, gun deaths are unprecedented here versus the entire world, and the GOP’s gun policies and culture wars are a major reason behind that! Good lord, the lack of context.
-Another bad headline and lede, “‘Like Choosing Between a Hedgehog and a Porcupine’: US Braces For Presidential Election No One Wants” by Joan Greve…I mean, just that headline ‘an election no one wants’ encourages people to sigh and not turn out to vote when there is a real clear choice to make, which is a terrible thing for a journalistic outlet in a democratic nation trying to preserve itself to publish. In the leading paragraphs we get quotes from a disgruntled Nikki Haley primary voter and two “South Carolina primary voters” wherein the “hedgehog and porcupine” framing comes from. This is just another variant on the “let’s see what folks in heartland diners think” like you should find wisdom, except expecting to find wisdom from a third party voter and two ‘independents’ at a southeastern primary in a two-party system is pretty silly. This is actively seeking out disaffected people to make an overly broad claim about disaffection. Then FiveThirtyEight is cited and a political scientist is quoted as saying “There’s a widespread perception among those individuals that the candidates are too old and that they tend to focus on issues that are issues of yesterday.” Without noting that “those individuals” are the people who are unhappy (a circular definition) and without challenging any falsehood in what those people believe. Then they miss the opportunity to ask if it’s true that Biden and Trump are focused on issues of yesterday at all! Does that logically hold up when they’re campaigning on things like taxes, climate change, immigration, cultural grievance, inflation, Ukraine, Gaza, and so many other things that are happening right now? Instead ignorance is just given a sheen of justification by having a professional repeat what a subset of non-professionals incorrectly believe...
In the same article, the ledes of positivity and optimism are buried. “Not that Joe Biden has not done a good job. He has done some very good things for this country,” Hudson said. “But I do think it is time for a new generation of leaders.” OK so Biden has done a good job, people want the next generation, but the general election in 2024 is between Biden and Trump. So who does Hudson or anyone like him pick? “I want to see the country survive, and I don’t think it will under Trump,” says another of these anecdotal interviewees. OK so why is the headline about how nobody wants to pick? There’s clearly a choice being made, and it’s not Trump. Or, “[Trump] is just a terrible human being and doesn’t deserve any votes” says another. Even if that is from someone who has not committed to voting for Biden, they definitely aren’t voting for Trump, and sounds like they will encourage others to not vote for Trump given the opportunity. From the Israel/Gaza protesting end of the left, we get “I know that I will never vote for Trump. That is a given”. Sounds pretty clear! One person out of several is for Trump, and one person mentions that there are Trumpers out there in the ether that will always support him, but they aren’t being investigated or interviewed in the article, which is a collection of anecdotes supported by just one inaccurate polling source for its data. Overall, doesn’t hold up or support its headline or opening paragraphs yet again.
And now the article that prompted me to write this diary aka THE POINT
“Democrats Are Angry Over Media Coverage of Biden. Is It A Distraction?” by David Smith, Washington Bureau Chief for The Guardian
Gird yourself here, you’re liable to experience a spike in blood pressure! But I’m here to help assure you you’re not crazy.
The Smith article begins by noting there has been criticism of bad polls amplifying misinformation at the New York Times. It again condescendingly reminds Democrats that “the nation is hurtling towards a Biden v Trump rematch” (cue me screaming WE KNOW! GET ON WITH IT ALREADY!!) and then insinuates Democrats aren’t focusing on what they should be by saying: “But whatever the merits of the arguments, critics argue that Democrats are at risk of playing a blame game that distracts them from the central mission: defeating Trump at the ballot box.” Let’s unpack that shall we?
First off, who are critics? Might it include David Smith and elements of mainstream media protecting their own bottom lines? “But whatever the merits of the arguments...” is code for “ignoring the fact that you’re right for now...”, and then ignorantly tells us that we’re missing the central mission! In fact I’d say that is very much my main concern by noting that some of the greatest headwinds to beating Trump at the ballot box in November is misinforming reporting from large news outlets that fan the flames of ignorance by citing a minority of disaffected people who are demotivated by misinforming reporting that uses systemically flawed polling and poorly quoted ‘professionals’ to amplify and overstate the impact of a minority of disaffected people on the election! AKA a vicious circle of misinformation that the mainstream media is directly at the heart of perpetuating.
In other words, we know exactly what we’re doing when we criticize NYT, Siena, 538, and now The Guardian to name just a few: we’re going after the sources of the misinformation that would level a clear choice between good and evil in the next election by portraying it as a fight between “porcupine and hedgehog” or ‘guy who says ‘Illegals’ versus guy who criticizes Biden’, neither of which capture the facts of the electoral choice at all; by quoting someone who doesn’t care and then asking a professional to explain why people who don’t care might not care, we are not informed. Yet somehow, Democrats are the ones missing the point! Way to be completely blind and self-delusional, David Smith and The Guardian!
As I wrote David Smith and multiple editors at The Guardian via email, when this article cites a Lincoln Project talking head that says “Commiseration is not a strategy and Democrats need to stop throwing political temper tantrums and do the work to unify and get Joe Biden re-elected.”, my response is “Yet the media is repeatedly ignoring the many ways that Democrats ARE united, the repeat poll-beating performances of Democrats in special elections, how the Democratic house minority is repeatedly unified and achieving major legislative accomplishments against the GOP majority. These are ignored and again, the finger pointing is at Democrats!” Every time Democrats succeed, the goalpost is moved and an old article that cited a bad poll and a talking head that tried to explain why disaffected people are disaffected will be called up as proof that they’re not wrong that disaffected people exist and Democrats should be terrified about them, even though it’s actually just proof of them being wrong the entire time. Not to state we should be so confident as to let up on the gas, but nor should we be living in abject terror under the misinformation handed down irresponsibly from on high.
A closing dose of pragmatic optimism
There is good news in all this madness: first, in the flawed model of journalistic bothsiderism, our side is still being aired and can be distributed and amplified, which it frequently is. Even on The Guardian I have noted that these articles I have cited in this diary as proof of their flawed bothsiderism have never appeared in their top 10 most clicked or top 10 most deeply read articles lists that I have seen; readers are apparently not engaging with them as much as the more willfully pro-Biden/anti-Trump articles. The media and the pollsters are in the midst of failing to sell this narrative that bothsiderism is a good and valued aspect to journalism and they are on their back foot and losing the argument that this aspect of journalism is worth preserving, just in time to save our democratic institution from the jaws of a minority of disaffected voters and misinformation from the fourth estate that would oversell their importance and its impact on our near future. The fact that David Smith even wrote “Democrats Are Angry Over Media Coverage of Biden” is because so many of us have commented and opined that the media is doing a poor job; that PressWatchers have published a discussion about it w.r.t. the New York Times, that Jennifer Rubin called out the media in The Washington Post, and that people are continuing to find better information outside of conventional news outlets in the deeply flawed but still frequently informative wilds of the internet.
I encourage anyone who feels so inclined to use the contact information at The Guardian US website, or to find similar contact information for any outlet that you feel is engaging in this thumbing of the scales, to civilly but firmly state your dissatisfaction with their bothsiderism. It is frustrating but this feels like a sociocultural moment wherein the fourth estate really can be pushed to take better account of itself, and provide us a saner information space in the near future.