This story has been adapted from a diary comment.
Given the harsh media coverage of the Biden Administration, I had occasion recently to wonder whether the media were somehow nostalgic for the chaotic Trump days, looking to rekindle the same old sensationalist spark of near-constant chaos and obsessive media coverage of that chaos. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, after all, that they would want those conditions back: just think of the way that we were all glued to our smartphones every day of his four-year term, grabbing them anxiously, first thing in the morning, to doomscroll through and see which constitutional guardrail he had knocked over during the night.
I know my media consumption ticked way up during the Trump years; I had subscriptions to both the Washington Post and, against my better judgment, the New York Times, a reliable repository of puff pieces about white supremacists that they tracked down in diners to say something positive about President Dumpster Fire. You could definitely see how the profit-obsessed media, driven by ratings and shareholder value, would want that situation back, no matter how bad it was for everyone else: didn’t one of the network heads say something like, “Trump — bad for democracy, great for us?” Or something like that?
Anyhow, tempting as that working theory is, I think that we need to look a bit at the longer historical context here to truly understand what’s going on. It’s not so much that the media are “all in for Trump” as that they are decidedly “out” for anything that looks like accurate coverage of the huge asymmetry between Dems and Republicans.
The problem is that the media is structured to treat everything like this one editorial cartoon I came across during the Bush v. Gore election in 2000. The cartoon was a play on the idea of the “electoral college,” with Bush depicted as the bro-y frat jock and Al Gore as his annoyed nerdy bookworm roommate. The “college” was populated by red elephants and blue mules, each group with their own virtues and pecadillos, each one equally deserving of ridicule. (I’ve Googled this cartoon for years now and have yet to be able to track it down. It was a near-perfect piece of bothsidesist propaganda.)
That wasn’t really true even in 2000. Countless Naderite jibes about “Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum” notwithstanding, the choice in that election was between a thoughtful leader with an actual grasp on public policy and a child of privilege who had glided through Yale on a series of “Gentleman C’s,” who was politically in bed with weirdly terrifying Christian fundamentalists and who would wind up outsourcing much of his administration to a sinister, Machiavellian VP.
But the coverage of the election was determined to be “evenhanded,” to treat Bush’s foreign policy as every bit as carefully thought-through as Al Gore’s, despite their radically (and alarmingly) different levels of knowledge about basic international geography. In fact, the press often leaned in to their positive coverage of Bush, perhaps abetted by informal rumors that the Bush campaign was more generous to the press with lobster rolls (vs. the day-old sandwiches they got on the Gore campaign jet).
And once Bush was in office, alongside his skyrocketing post-9-11 approval ratings, the Beltway press was committed to access journalism of a kind that the Bush administration was all too happy to exploit. Urgent, life-or-death stories about Bush administration excesses in the prosecution of the War on Terror or the unilateral invasion of a sovereign nation had their teeth removed by a White House press corps indistinguishable from a White House stenography pool.
Informing all of this, of course, is that since the late 1960s, the media has gradually learned to become terrified of the accusation of having a liberal bias. The New York Times seems to have been especially sensitive to that accusation over the years, despite the fact that it had rounded out its op-ed columnists with a long list of eye-roll-inducing conservatives over the years, and despite the fact that the Times’s audience has never been made up of “liberals” so much as it has been assembled from affluent members of the New York/D.C. chattering classes, the type of absurdly rich reader who is weirdly credulous when faced with a Tom Friedman column but who is not quite Republican enough to read the Wall Street Journal.
So this is why the shift from Trump coverage to Biden coverage has not been a salutary one for Biden. It’s not, after all, as if they were entirely uncritical of Trump; the big “newspapers of record” clearly did notice the alarming weirdness of his administration. For instance, I think the Washington Post had a weekly feature called something like, “Can He Do That?” — that was wholly devoted to exploring this or that area of alarming Trumpian transgression. As we got into the post-election period in late 2020 — the time in any other defeated one-term presidency that would be called the “lame duck” period — we saw the end result of columns that had been posted for almost the entire duration of Trump’s presidency about whether it was prudent for journalists to refer to his lies as lies: faced with Trump making alarming falsehoods about the stolen election on the nightly news, media outlets decided to stop presenting some of his statements; decided to explicitly call out those statements as false, to a degree they hadn’t before; and in the case of Twitter and Facebook, deplatformed him entirely.
Nevertheless, when Biden got into office, you could hear the Beltway media sigh with relief, for now they could return to the same problematic patterns that had been their bread and butter from at least the Bill Clinton presidency onwards — false equivalency, the need to impose upon stories a “both sides” evenness that doesn’t square with empirically verifiable reality. Because on the one hand, you have a center-left party of technocrats who are highly competent in the policy arena and who in their better days have some pretty good, pretty thoughtful ideas about how to make people’s lives better and how best to run the country; on the other, you have a rabidly rightwing party of market fundamentalists and patriarchal white supremacists who have had no actual new ideas about how to govern the country since the defeat of the Romney campaign at the very most recent, and whose policy platform in 2021 seems to comprise two planks: a) banning transgender bathrooms, and b) dismantling democratic governance as we know it.
So: that’s my take on it, anyhow — as nostalgic as some CNN execs must be at the prospect of another four years of viral tweets, caustic soundbites, and palace intrigue tell-alls from ex-Trump administration officials, I think they don’t quite feel comfortable when everything in the moment points quite obviously to the intrinsic differences between Democrats and Republicans. Because then they might have to actually do some real shoe-leather reportage — and the last thing they want to have to do is their actual jobs.