Should Joe Biden drop out of the presidential race?
That’s open to debate but if anyone thinks he should do it because another candidate would get better press coverage, that person should think again. Because if there is one thing for certain I can say about media coverage of presidential campaigns, it is that in almost every election in my voting lifetime (since Reagan/Carter) the media coverage is characterized by an intense focus on a trivial flaw of the Democratic nominee.
With Carter it was on a comment he made about malaise in a speech. Walter Mondale was a wimp. Michael Dukakis, son of poor immigrants, was actually the elitist in the field running against the former CIA director, son of a U.S. senator and grandson of a wealthy industrialist! Bill Clinton, well …. yeah. Al Gore was too serious. John Kerry windsurfed and spoke French. Obama attended a church with a fiery Black preacher and was criticized by a guy called Joe the Plumber. For Hillary, it was “but her emails.”
The problem with replacing Biden is that whomever would be chosen would be attacked non-stop in the same manner, in a way that the press never focuses on Republicans. GOP scandals last a day and coverage ends, even when they are serious. Trump has shown many times more signs of mental deterioration than Biden, his campaign events (and the debate) are riddled with nothing approaching a coherent thought or anything truthful, he is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, his business is fraudulent and he almost certainly sells national security secrets to enemies, yet he faces no pressure from the mainstream press.
Perpetual Bias Machine
Why is the coverage so perpetually one-sided? One can speculate. (To bolster my credentials to speculate, I was a journalist for a quarter century, half in the newspaper industry and half in the financial press, where I won national awards for my coverage.)
One theory is that the media is biased. Partisan journalism is a thing, pioneered by Fox News and copied by a thousand services real and fake. Rupert Murdoch not only controls Fox and the Wall Street Journal, but his minions also now run the Washington Post and other outlets. It remains incredible to me that Maggie Haberman is allowed to cover Trump after we have seen emails from his aides talking about how they can plant stories with her. However, I think that theory only goes so far, and doesn’t explain much of the bias we see.
Another theory is that journalists or people who run media companies are getting paid off. While there is a wingnut welfare system that creates incentives for journalists to turn to the right, where they’ll always have a high paid job, again I don’t think this explains the frenzy we see in most mainstream outlets. I think a more likely theory is that most mainstream reporters and editors are lazy, fear discomfort and want to think highly of themselves.
What do I mean? Well, for one thing, it takes a lot less brain power to write stories about horserace and personality than policy. You have to have a completely vacuous view of politics to even consider the idea that if people believe Biden is too old, they’ll turn around and vote for Trump.
If my core political beliefs are around creating a better health care system, fair treatment of the poor, taxing billionaires, encouraging green energy, allowing woman to choose health care, opposing authoritarian dictators, or installing non-corrupt Supreme Court justices, why would Biden’s age or condition have anything at all to do with my vote? Only if you view the presidency through the lens of personality or Washington cocktail parties would the focus be on personality or age.
A few months ago I attended a real estate conference in which a well-known Washington Post columnist was a keynote speaker. During his talk, he spoke approvingly of Biden’s policies, domestic and foreign, but kept coming back to the president’s age. Afterwards I asked him, if you believe the President’s policies are sound and he passed tons of legislation and has run a smart foreign policy, how can you say he isn’t up to the job? Isn’t the job to make policy decisions and not tap-dancing? He grimaced and said something about Kamala Harris, but it was clear he didn’t like my question and didn’t want to continue the conversation.
Writing about policy requires actual work. You have to get facts and figures and learn new and complicated things. Much easier to bang out personality pieces that don’t require anything more than talking to your sources/friends.
The second part is fearing discomfort. Republicans have made working the refs and art, and it gets worse by the day. Any journalist who writes truth and not GOP talking points will be under a huge amount of pressure, and many lose their jobs. Recent examples of MSM journalists who did their jobs with integrity and were let go include Dan Froomkin, John Harwood, Margaret Sullivan and Greg Sergeant. In case one hasn’t noticed, there are very few liberals on cable news, where balance means right-wing Republicans are balanced by anti-Trump Republicans. Very few articulate liberal voices get on – and stay on – the airways or fill op-ed columns of major papers anymore. There is a clear career bias against truth-tellers and it’s much, much easier to go with the flow and report what everyone else is reporting.
Cowardly Lions
Finally, I think much of the one-sided reporting is the result of many of these lazy and cowardly reporters thinking of themselves as unbiased. Few reporters want to think of themselves as a lackey, and as I said I don’t believe reporters for CNN, the NYT or WaPo are getting paid off. Writing tough stories about Democrats allows these reporters to think in their own minds that they are tough, hard-hitting journalists who report bad things about a party they might personally prefer. But the truth is that they are taking the path of least resistance, lying to their readers and harming the country and world. Vladimir Putin is bombing children’s hospitals in Ukraine knowing he will be rewarded if Trump wins. Ignoring Trump’s foreign policy mendacity faciliates real-world evil.
While I don’t have much hope Democrats will grow a spine, think it is far past time they go on the offensive. I find it amazing that the press secretary calls on Fox reporters without mocking them every day for the $787 million settlement for lying. And then answers their questions seriously. Make reporters who lie – and by distorting coverage that is what they are doing – pay a price. How effective that will be is unknown, because Democrats and Republicans have different constituencies who react to different things, but in my view it is high time to stop turning the other cheek.