Did you ever read a column and think, “You must be joking”?
That was my reaction to Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. on Tuesday trying to explain “How media coverage drove Biden’s political plunge.” Bacon tweeted it this way: “One of the biggest challenges for Biden has been facing a mainstream media looking to ‘balance’ its anti-Trump coverage from 2017-2020.”
The media is President Joe Biden’s biggest challenge? Not the wind beneath his erratic wings? Even when they report on inflation or the baby formula shortage or the border crisis, Biden is spared the blame.
It’s bizarre to argue the media is currently whipsawing Biden in an attempt to “balance” anti-Trump coverage from 2017-2020. We’re still overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of anti-Trump coverage from 2021-2022.
One might imagine Donald Trump is still president from the dominance of Jan. 6 hearings on cable news, not to mention its offshoots (like the Steve Bannon trial for contempt of Congress). One might think Trump is still president from the ongoing excitement over Trump “tell-alls” and anti-Trump jeremiads on bestseller lists.
But let’s get beyond Bacon’s wacky tweet. His grand thesis is, “the mainstream media has played a huge, underappreciated role in President Biden’s declining support over the past year.”
The media’s “flawed coverage model” of Biden isn’t just bad for Biden, “it results in a distorted national discourse that weakens our democracy.”
In this man’s leftist worldview, the media has been feverishly itching to wreck Biden. The disastrous Afghanistan pullout “provided journalists the anti-Biden story that I think many of them were desperate to find.” Many would laugh and stop reading about there.
Bacon seriously believes the media has “long-standing biases toward bothsidesism” (?) and an “equally positive and negative to both sides” approach. He hates this notion, which he says “has been challenged by the increasingly radical and antidemocratic Republican Party. Honest coverage of political news often seems anti-GOP.”
This is the arrogance of the liberal media. Any attempt at “honest reporting” trashes all Republicans as “radical and antidemocratic.” So “honesty” is defined as the opposite of “bothsidesism.” Honesty requires keeping the “antidemocratic” radicals off the Jan. 6 committee and off all the respectable TV interview shows. Earth to Perry: The liberal media distorts the national discourse by barely featuring Republicans who aren’t as anti-Trump as Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Imagine that. The Washington Post crowd posits that “democracy” requires positioning the conservatives “in darkness.”
Bacon offered more delusions in this column, as in Biden’s flawed approach has been “reducing partisanship in Washington.” Biden runs around insisting Republicans are an extreme “MAGA crowd” pushing “Jim Crow 2.0,” and that’s too bipartisan? But Bacon and his fellow lefties think Republicans should be routinely smashed and trashed, and not treated with any respect.
He explicitly demands more bias: “Yes, I am calling for the media to cover Biden more positively. Not in the sense of declaring Biden a better man than Trump (though that is obviously true).” They should “actually cover America’s problems and whether Biden is solving them — or at least has better policies than the Republicans. That’s the kind of journalism we need.”
We “need” journalism that throbs with anti-Republican energy.
Recent surveys of public trust in the media are showing all-time lows, but inside the media, all the demands are to speak more aggressively on behalf of Democrats and the left. Double down and drink deeply to defeat the hangover, says Dr. Perry Bacon.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Democracy Dies in Darkness, LOL! That WaPo was delusional 40 years ago, hasn’t changed a bit since then.
And when Democrats die, they die in ignorance, having learned nothing of worth, no matter how long they have lived.
They actually have learned their lessons well. This American National socialist woke media uses Trump as the blame game of choice for all their problems and failures like Hitler blamed and used the Jews, and Joe their useful idiot to get their radical policies put forth in executive order which they know will politically execute the age depleted dope that proposes them. Joe is the both the media scape goat and the sacrificial lamb destined from the beginning to be hung out bare back dry on a spit like Cabrito in a Mexican Restaurant. Before it is all over you will be able to see the tread marks on his face from being thrown under their manipulating media bus as many times as it takes to get him removed form office to pave the way for his Communist/Socialist, otherwise unelectable successor.
Good counterpoint, inluminatuo. Well stated as always.
Pull my other leg. IT has bells on.
Amazing! I didn’t think that it was possible to be any more delusional than Alexandria Obviously Communist or Maxine Mudbrain Waters but I see I was wrong. Perry Bacon Jr. must be on some very serious drugs to think that anyone in the CMSM (Communist Main Stream Media) is biased against Bite-Me Biden in the least.