A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Mainstream Media Figures Detect MSM "Bothsidesism" Bias, Notes It
Helps GOP!

CNN's interview with self-proclaimed coup-meister John Bolton,
assessing the January 6th insurrection, airily passed over some horrific
U.S. misdeeds.

The Washington Post recently published Perry Bacon Jr.'s piece,
entitled "How media coverage drove Biden's political plunge."
and
it inspired a great deal of Twitter attention. This is all to the good,
as the piece is full of good sense and important arguments that
Bacon's colleagues desperately need to consider, since most of them
blithely ignore the role they are playing in normalizing a potentially
fascist threat to end our democracy coming from the Republican Party.

Many people on the Left have every reason to feel a little pissy about
the attention drawn to articles like this one.  Frequently, when
mainstream media figures pick up arguments and evidence that have been
appearing in our magazines and websites for months (or years), MSM
reporters hail themselves as brave geniuses. But it's churlish and
counterproductive to complain about it. Yes, when published on the Left,
these arguments are usually dismissed as just so much whining by people
whose views are routinely ignored, but when they do get picked up, one
can argue that the political/cultural ecosystem of the "little
magazine" worked just as it is supposed to. (Victor Navasky explains
this best in his book, A Matter of Opinion
,
which leans heavily on the arguments about the importance of the
"public sphere" originally articulated by Jurgen Habermas
.)

The archetypal example of this process is Norman Ornstein and Thomas
Mann's seminal 2012 Washington Post article, "Let's Just Say It:
The Republicans Are the Problem
,"
later turned into a book
).
Again, however well-executed, the argument was not new to anyone
familiar with the contents of the progressive press at the time. It
derived much of its influence from the impeccable establishment
credentials of its authors, though these were sacrificed to a degree by
the article itself. (I discuss this phenomenon especially as it related
to Ornstein here
.)
The truth of this observation was reinforced to me when I asked Norm
Ornstein if he would be interested in having The Nation

publish the introduction to the book's 2016 paperback edition
.
He said he would think about it but was reluctant to do so because it
would then be pigeonholed as a leftist critique. In retrospect, I think
he was right to demure.

Now back to Bacon. He observes that "The mainstream media has played a
huge, underappreciated role in President Biden's declining support
over the past year. 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," and goes on to explore how this
happened. There are quite a few reasons having to do with the structure
of the mainstream media and the mindset of its members, but insofar as
the recent history of events goes, he focuses on the reaction to the US
withdrawal in Afghanistan, writing: "One of the sharpest dips in
Biden's approval rating
-which
has dropped from 55 percent in January 2021 to less than 39 percent
today-happened last August, when it declined almost five points in a
single month. There wasn't a huge surge in gas prices
,
nor some big legislative failure. What caused Biden's dip was the U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan-or, rather, the media's 24/7, highly
negative coverage of it."

Bacon does not entirely absolve Biden of some of the mistakes his
administration made during that period, but he notes, again, accurately,
that the hysterical nature of the coverage of what took place was not
remotely justified. "Journalists and outlets tore into the
president," he writes, with Axios calling the withdrawal "Biden's
stain
,"
NBC News correspondent Richard Engel declaring that "history will
judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States
,"
and CNN's Jake Tapper asking an administration official on his show,
"Does President Biden not bear the blame for this disastrous exit from
Afghanistan?
"

After the withdrawal, he notes, "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."

Even loyal Altercation readers may be forgiven for forgetting that this
column addressed these points on August 20, 2021

and again, two weeks later on September 3, 2021
.
Bacon does not mention these pieces, but he does rightly point to this
one by his Post colleague: Dana Milbank: "The media treats Biden as
badly as-or worse than-Trump. Here's proof.
"

Bacon then goes on to address the structural reasons why coverage of the
Biden administration has been so badly skewed. His arguments track
nicely with another Altercation column, this one published on December
21, 2021
.
He particularly mentions "the media's long-standing biases toward
bothsidesism," which manifests itself in "equally positive and
negative to both sides," as outdated given the "increasingly radical
and antidemocratic Republican Party," so that "Honest coverage of
political news often seems anti-GOP." (See Altercation, January 14,
2022
.)

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
.
(He might have mentioned the role that decades of the right's
"working the refs
"
has played in achieving this result. He might also have mentioned the
role of the newspaper in which he was writing.)

Anyway, as well constructed as Bacon's article is, much of it strikes
one as just common sense. For instance, this paragraph: "Biden is
polling worse than Trump was in July 2020
, when
thousands of people were dying each week of covid
, a
situation much worse than the real and serious problem of high inflation
in the Biden era. You can't credibly argue that Trump, with his
constant inflammatory statements and incompetent management, was a
better president than Biden. These poll numbers reflect something gone
wrong." And what has gone wrong is the manner in which press coverage
aiding 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."

Read the whole thing when you get a chance.

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I could have written a similar post to the one above about Charles
Homans' current New York Times Magazine piece,  "How 'Stop the
Steal' Captured the American Right
." It
is well-reported and tells a coherent story in which the intelligent
reader will have no choice but to decide that Republicans today are both
dangerous and crazy.

Here is the dangerous part: "In 17 of the 27 states holding elections
this year for secretary of state-the top elections officer in 24
states-at least one Republican candidate is running on the claim that
the 2020 election was illegitimate

... Scores of groups have organized at the state and local levels to
conduct partisan audits of the 2020 election results, support officials
and candidates who would do the same and run or volunteer for local
positions that operate or monitor elections: the thousands of obscure
pressure points in a system that most Republicans profess to believe was
turned against them in 2020. Providing the oxygen for these efforts, and
often working to connect them, are a cohort of national right-wing media
figures and activists, many of them tied to the postelection efforts to
stop the transfer of power."

And here is the crazy part:

"When I asked what they thought about the last election or the next
one, most cited one or another strand of the Trump-centric QAnon
conspiracy theory. 'It starts with the British royal monarchy and the
Vatican that are controlling everything,' Jill Wood, a rallygoer from
Ohio, told me. 'There's only two teams: Team Jesus and Team Lucifer.
And it's very easy to pick a side.' Homans does a nice job of
connecting these views to those of say, Pennsylvania Republican
gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, who announced to a crowd of
such supporters, "It seems like it's in their nature to lie... Every
time I turn around, there's another lie, another excuse, another
cheating." He went on: "We're appealing to God. We're speaking
life over the state; we're speaking truth. Those who lied and cheated
and stealed [sic] will be exposed and thrown in jail."

What the article does not do, however-and one might argue that, like
so many articles in the Times about the current Republican Party, and
one might fairly say, it actually whitewashes-is the racism that
underlies so much of what the Tea Party stood for, and the entire party
now stands behind. Homans discusses the Tea Party at length, and but
nowhere does he appear to be familiar with studies like this one:
"Threats to Racial Status Promote Tea Party Support Among White
Americans
"
and this one: "Anti-minority attitudes and Tea Party Movement
membership
"
or even this article from Vox: "How Southern racism found a home in
the Tea Party
."
It may not be true of everyone, but it is certainly true of mainstream
reporters, that when it comes to the destruction of democracy and the
threat of fascism, there's no more appropriate cliché than "If
you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

Music next week, sorry.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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