POLITICO’s co-founder and “Founding Editor” John F. Harris just admitted that POLITICO is biased in favor of right-wing politics. Of course, he didn’t actually say that. In a weekly column titled “One Big Thing the Dems Get Wrong About Warren | The political establishment loves the center. But it’s the radicals who end up writing history,” he claims to be biased towards centrists:
Meanwhile, a quarter-century covering national politics has convinced me that the more pervasive force shaping coverage of Washington and elections is what might be thought of as centrist bias, flowing from reporters and sources alike. It is a headwind for Warren, Sanders, the “squad” on Capitol Hill, even for Trump. This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting, a conviction that politics should be a tidier and more rational process than it usually is.
A confession: I’ve got it. A pretty strong bout, actually.
This is hardly revelatory. Most mainstream outlets that claim to be non-partisan either eschew “extreme and polarizing” voices, or else present opposing voices that they claim represent both sides “equally.” However, Harris then goes on to bash progressives exclusively:
It is clear that Warren, who has so far run the most disruptive and effective campaign of the Democratic race, is ready to divide the country and her party over the proposition that a much more aggressive role for government is needed to bring business to heel and protect individuals and the global climate from the predations of a free market. Sanders has won a corps of devoted backers animated by the same disdain for centrism.
This paragraph sounds like it came from the RNC, not from a “centrist.” And he criticizes progressivism throughout the column. However, there’s no corresponding criticism of trump or trumpism aside from a casual mention of trump “becoming more divisive by the day in positions and rhetoric.” Seriously. Where are bothsidesism and whataboutism when you really need them?
Alex Sheppard at The New Republic put it well in “The Media Has a Right-Wing Bias. Politico’s Founder Just Admitted It | How Republicans benefit from the media's centrist instincts”:
Here one of the nation’s preeminent political journalists is admitting that he and other members of his class adhere to a rather cynical ideology—the ideology of finding the midway point between a normal party with normal policies and proposals and an intellectually bankrupt tribe of troglodytes that gets crazier and more morally repugnant by the day. The problem, in the view of Harris, is that pesky “activists” (which is really just another word for “voters”) get in the way. Candidates like Warren and Bernie Sanders suffer in this environment because their ideas are out of step with the D.C. consensus. They are automatically categorized as “extreme,” their ideas “unworkable,” all because they reject the midway-point mode of governance, which only ends up favoring the actual extremists on the right.
It’s a good piece that I recommend reading. But the salient point to me is that Harris’ idea of “centrism” is finding the midpoint between progressivism, which Harris characterizes as “ideological zealotry,” and trumpism, which we know to be actual zealotry (though with trump as the figurehead, no ideology is required unless you count sociopathy, racism, sexism, religious intolerance, homophobia, and xenophobia as ideologies). People who are midway between these two endpoints aren’t centrists, they’re various degrees of right-wing.
This is your periodic reminder that editors write headlines. And a publication with a right-wing editor is going to produce content with right-wing titles, even if the article’s content is not ideological. We’ve known for a long time that POLITICO is biased against progressives. But it’s nice of its founding editor to say so.
One more nugget the exposes the incoherence of Harris’ argument against progressivism for centrism:
Fundamental societal change comes from people burning with grievances, obsessed with remedies, ready to demolish old power arrangements to achieve their ends.
Ya think?!? This is what what politics in general and progressivism in particular are designed to accommodate — the will of the people to remedy injustice and inequality by effecting systemic change via elections! Harris and POLITICO had better get a clue.
As noted in the comments, Vox also wrote about Harris’ column, though its article’s focus is more on media centrism as opposed to how what passes for “centrism” is actually right-wing dogma.