Preview

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.

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.”