Ultimately the Democratic Party gets to decide who its nominee is, for better or worse. But it certainly seems like parts of the media believe they it is their job to choose the Democratic candidate, rather than covering the strengths and weaknesses of *both* candidates running for President.
Been thinking about the Claudine Gay coverage as a keystone to Biden coverage : it was an editorial campaign driven by story after story. It takes enormous editorial hubris to be certain they are right (they were wrong about Gay).
What I wrote then: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-campai...
They’d send me Mike Powell push notifications for “trans people try to end the word women” and the only support for it was a little read years old blog post. It’s so obvious what they’ve been doing and it’s gross as fuck.
Page and Shapiro’s book on public opinion dynamics has a chapter about how a chorus of sustained media coverage is the (only?) thing that can change public opinion.
(That’s my summary; it’s not quite read that way by most practitioners but I think it’s a fair summary.)
Moreover what that means is that Fox and the conservative columnists at WaPo, NYT, etc play a powerful role in our media — they prevent that chorus and prevent a clear elite consensus from forming.
this still feels like an asymmetrical issue but just in case
David Brooks & Brett Stephens have grown too dumb and predictable to publish; they must go and be replaced by any sentient or near sentient luncheon meat
Gay didn’t actually do anything wrong, though; Biden’s debate performance would be equivalent to her going out and giving a plagiarized speech after months of plagiarism accusations.
When after months of “Is Biden too old?” stories, he goes on TV for a debate intended to put that question to rest and instead demonstrates to tens of millions of live viewers that actually maybe he is too old, even very slanted coverage gains a certain amount of legitimacy.
That doesn't seem quite right to me; if anything, they're tipping their hand as a Democratic newspaper (which expresses itself by acting as if it's responsible for disciplining the Democrats)
Yeah agree. I think it's a lot of wanting to be the "right" sort of Democrat, who gets to traffic cop everyone else and say what the savvy party line is.
Also, because their readers are so heavily Dem, I suspect these articles get a lot of clicks.
Do you also think of e.g., Fox News as a Democratic media institution, since they're always wall-to-wall criticizing Democrats while going easy on Republicans?
No, I think the tone of Fox is quite different! I don't think the Times is anti-Harvard; it's so Harvard-identified it felt obligated to take down the president of Harvard in the belief that it would immunize Harvard from the kinds of right-wing attacks the Times was abetting.
Maybe a different standard could be applied to niche and/or internal publications. For a generalist publication like the Times we can just take the angle (negative towards progressives) and volume (enormous) of coverage at face value. Anything else is, to me, mental gymnastics.
It feels to me like what James Comey did: expecting the Democrat to win, thus bending over backwards to not appear biased, to the extent that your behavior becomes biased in the other direction
Will no one think of the book advances to come when Trump the Chaos Agent returns to the WH? The journos of the NYT certainly think of them, and expect their privilege will protect them from any unfortunate consequences.
