Conservatives have long derided the news media, claiming that outlets are biased against them. And their efforts to work the refs have largely succeeded, with the media regularly giving “both sides” of issues equal weight and thereby warping reality.
Bothsidesism has been a problem for a long time, but this election cycle has exposed the political media for the sham that it is. And Vice President Kamala Harris is finally doing what conservatives have done for decades, treating political journalists appropriately and no longer pretending they serve a lofty goal in our democracy, because they don’t.
Our democracy is on the edge, and a wannabe despot is within striking range of retaking power, but The New York Times is giving undue attention to things like how an old campaign website for Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said he’d won an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, when in fact the award was from the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce. Who cares?
If there was a time when highlighting such inanities made sense, it was long ago and in an era when politicians were boring, doing boring things, so every silly mini-scandal seemed outrageous and important. But Donald Trump has changed the rules.
Infidelity used to be the biggest story ever, such as when then-Sen. Gary Hart, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate for the 1988 election, was forced to end his campaign after news of his affairs came out. But Trump boasted about his affairs and won an election.
Politicians had to go to church and make a big show of it! Trump doesn’t even pretend.
Politicians had to treat the office of the presidency with gravitas and respect. Trump made it an extension of his grift.
Politicians had to speak intelligently. Trump tweets out “covfefe.”
Politicians couldn’t have private email servers, but that didn’t apply to the Trump administration.
Politicians had to behave with decorum. Trump engages in childish insults.
Leaked campaign emails were fair targets for media coverage, until it was Trump’s campaign emails that were leaked.
Politicians respected the peaceful transfer of power. Trump launched an insurrection.
Politicians shouldn’t be too old, as the media reminded us incessantly for the first half of this year. But Trump is now the oldest major-party presidential nominee in American history, older than former President Bill Clinton, who left office over 23 years ago, and the press doesn’t care.
Politicians couldn’t be cognitively declined, but Trump can degrade before our very eyes with minimal coverage and media regularly excerpting the least-crazy bits of his speeches for their stories. His speech at the Republican National Convention was as disqualifying as President Joe Biden’s June 27 debate performance.
The list goes on, and the worst part is that not a single Democrat would get a pass for any of that, much less all of it.
And then there’s the “fact-checking” this cycle.
The Washington Post on Aug. 20:
“Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again,” Biden said. But that’s not true. Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept. And he has previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.
A week later, I still can’t believe someone could write those words.
The New York Times on Aug. 20:
“He created the largest debt any president had in four years with his two trillion dollars tax cut for the wealthy.” — President Biden.
This is misleading. Looking at a single presidential term, Donald J. Trump’s administration did rack up more debt than any other in raw dollars — about $7.9 trillion. But the debt rose more under President Barack Obama’s eight years than under Mr. Trump’s four years.
No, it’s not misleading. Whatever happened with Obama over eight years has nothing to do with Biden, who even said “in four years.” Sheesh!
Politifact on Sept. 19, 2023:
A new ad from President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign takes aim at some of his Republican rivals' positions on abortion, highlighting comments by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump.
But one of Trump’s remarks featured in the Aug. 25 ad — about him supporting punishments for women who have abortions — is misleading. It omits that this comment is from 2016, that Trump walked it back the same day and that he isn’t promoting this as he seeks the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination.
No, the ad isn’t misleading. Trump literally said at an MSNBC town hall that he supports punishing women who get abortions. His panicked campaign, knowing how awful the moment was, frantically issued a retraction after the event. But that was a calculated effort at damage control, not Trump’s own unvarnished words—and that’s what the ad shows: video of Trump saying those words.
So many of the media’s fact-checkers are desperate to provide “balance,” lest lying conservatives accuse them of bias. But a journalist’s job shouldn’t be to create the facade of balance; it should be to present the truth. And it is unambiguously true that conservatives lie a hell of a lot more than liberals. If the worst that can be said about Walz is that he once omitted the word “junior” from a list of awards, perhaps the story is actually how deep the disparity between the right and the left is on matters of the truth.
And there are so many more examples of errant “fact checking.”
Republicans and independents have long soured on the media, but liberals have finally been shit on enough to give up defending it. According to Gallup data released in early 2024, the share of Democrats rate “the honesty and ethical standards of journalists” highly or very highly has plummeted from over 50% in 2018, to just 34% recently—and the trend is down, down, down.
Not that Beltway journalists are going down without kicking and screaming. Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin, whom I actually respect quite a bit, recently argued that Harris should do more media interviews.
“To use an example Dems will hate: [Sen. JD] Vance did a couple big interviews, got a lot of tough qs on the cat lady stuff, then was freed to do nonstop media promoting the campaign message with that out of the way,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
Can you imagine thinking that Vance has been “freed” from the “cat lady” scandal because he did some interviews? Instead of proving that media interviews can help a politician, Sarlin proved the opposite: that the national discourse often continues regardless of what the media focuses on. That discourse no longer takes place primarily on newspaper pages and the nightly news. Now, there is social media, which is nowhere near done with the “cat lady” comments (much less the couch jokes).
At the same time, after the political press spent months pumping out stories about Biden’s age, it helped make the issue inescapable. But those moments are increasingly rare. And really, Democrats were the ones who fed that story, and Biden certainly didn’t help.
So now the media is trying to make “Harris is a flip-flopper” a thing.
Semafor’s David Weigel, a fantastic journalist, is right about calling out this not-so-subtle threat from the media: “Talk to us, or we’ll attack you.” (In case it isn’t clear, he is not making the threat himself. Rather, he’s observing how the media operates.)
On Thursday, Harris and Walz will hold a sit-down interview with CNN. But that’s unlikely to stop the media’s demand for undue deference. And the sooner liberals surrender giving that power to the Beltway media, the better we’ll all be.
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