I. Introduction
I’ve been turning this newsletter around in my head for a while but ultimately decided to write about it today because of the New York Times’ talk with Jamaal Bowman and Byron Donalds, a Democrat and Republican respectively, titled “The Fight to Define Extremism” or rather, the replies to it.
A lot of left-liberals genuinely believe the NYT and other mainstream media (CNN, Washington Post, NBC, etc.) are right-wing, but they simply aren’t right-wing, at least not in the ideological sense. However, many employed in the media are, whether consciously or subconsciously, huge chaos agents since sensationalism sells, especially on Twitter where far too many journalists spend every waking moment, and Republicans in power (or at least divided government) make for more drama which makes for greater profits.
My friend Dilan Esper wrote this about journalists (and academics) and I completely agree with him:
Journalists are supposed to deal in facts. They are supposed to check things. Their work product is supposed to be the result of an editorial process, with careful editing and fact checking. When they are on Twitter popping off based on no facts at all, the public sees this. Indeed, every day the public sees journalists do this. What do you think that does for the public’s trust in the journalistic profession?
The thing is though, Twitter simultaneously being the court of public opinion for journalists as well as the circus which they’re all constantly competing to be the star of does insane amounts of harm to the reputation and sanctity of the free press. If journalists’ eternal goal is to get clout and they’re extremely prone to being cowed and/or bought off by individuals and groups with their own selfish agendas, it’s actually insanely terrible for the concept of truth and free speech and well, democracy.
II. Partisan Allegations
Look at it like this: did the mainstream media (MSM) right up to the NYT really have a vendetta against Hillary Clinton and absolutely contributed to her 2016 loss? Yes. But, is the mainstream media biased against Hillary Rodham Clinton, and has been since my parents were in elementary school, in a way it’s not against some other Democrats? Also yes. The MSM hates Hillary Clinton to an insane level and doesn't particularly like Joe Biden either because they don't give the press access, which Barack Obama and Bill Clinton both did, and they bear the consequences of this privacy.
Of course, Obama giving the press access didn’t stop right-wing media from ceaselessly attacking him and his wife for 8 years (the media attacking Michelle Obama for wearing shorts to the Grand Canyon in mid-summer is one of my many villain origin stories), but giving the press access is necessary but not sufficient to receiving good coverage.
The thing about the MSM is that the majority of journalists and publishers aren’t Republicans, especially on social issues, but they, consciously or subconsciously, want Republicans to win because it’s beneficial to their business model, which is a paradox that most people don’t grasp. People like Seung Min Kim of the Associated Press or Jake Tapper of CNN don’t vote Republican, they all voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but that doesn’t stop them from covering the horrors incurred by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans like they’re the 2008 French Open final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
III. Ideological Reality Check
Returning to the NYT piece I linked to at the beginning of this piece, consider this excerpt.
The reality is that voters believe this excerpt! The contemporary nature of the two parties is such that swing voters who decide federal majorities view Republican extremism, and in particular Donald Trump, as worse and more harmful to them personally than Democratic extremism, but that doesn’t mean they agree with Democrats! If you don’t believe me, look at where voters place themselves compared to how they place Biden and the Democratic Party.
Left-liberals can argue until they’re blue in the face that using people’s preferred pronouns and allowing asylum seekers into the United States aren’t remotely on the same level as abortion bans and insurrections on the US Capitol, and I wholeheartedly agree. But, it’s also true that the extremism of the Republican Party in its current incarnation prevents Democrats from addressing the issues in which they’re perceived as “too far left,” and it would be a dereliction of the duty on the part of the free press if it didn’t cover that dichotomy.
IV. Breaking Down Partisanship
In theory, the MSM isn’t partisan, which means they can’t editorialize on the news from a conservative or liberal perspective although of course, they do. But, that said, I find it really egregious that so-called liberals, the bastions of freedom of speech, pitch a huge fit anytime that the media acknowledges that Republicans (by which we mean anybody to the right of Joe Biden on any issue, so like ~80% of the United States) are human beings who are cross-pressured just like everybody else but come to different conclusions.
Nobody on the left likes to admit this but Republicans are completely right when they say the MSM (save for token conservative outlets like the National Review and Fox News) is dominated by liberals. Despite the NYT having the largest circulation of any publication in United States, a country where 47% of the population voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden and Republicans hold 49 Senate seats and 222 House seats, I’d estimate that at least 85% of the NYT staff voted for Joe Biden. However, this dominance doesn’t translate to electoral power, which creates a lot of resentment from both conservatives and liberals.
The “coastal liberal” epithet is trite at this point in time and I’m as tired of articles about Ohio diners as everybody else, but do you really think that like, used car dealers and insurance salesmen in suburban Michigan or Wisconsin aren’t aware how liberals on the coasts talk about them, with complete and total derision and condescension? They have Internet in Indianapolis and Omaha, they can see all the editorials and comment sections calling anybody that’s ever voted Republican in their lives an uneducated plebeian.
Comfortably middle class but non-college educated voters are the mirror image of the downwardly mobile but college-educated voters, with the former group educationally polarized into voting Republican and the latter group inclined to vote Democrat for the same reasons.
V. What does all this mean for the American political ecosystem?
I sometimes despair that the media is an unfixable apparatus from a political standpoint and even personally, I go back and forth about what I want from the media.
Freddie De Boer wrote about how Democrats are in the worst of both worlds, where AOC and co. have a huge media presence and are on cable news nightly but little political clout and have to constantly defer to the likes of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, moderate Democrats who are still to the right of practically everybody that’s writing about them for various media publications. This is because like I’ve said many times before, the left-flank of the Democratic party is basically the human equivalent of hot air since their districts are so safely Democratic they could be replaced by semi-sentient blue garden gnomes.
I’m a partisan Democrat for a number of reasons, and I would love it if the media reported on Democrats like I tweet about them, as if they’re a sports team to be unequivocally supported, win or lose. But, I’m also a staunch proponent of free speech, and I genuinely don’t think facts don’t care about feelings (unlike Ben Shapiro or Ron DeSantis who larp as free speech advocates and are really just emotionally reactionary babies), so I find it really alarming that my fellow partisan Democrats have become downright hostile to free speech in favor of predetermined narratives they’ve deemed are unequivocally aligned with the party at large.
Reality isn’t stagnant, new information comes out daily, and the media HAS to report on it, even if it could hurt the Democratic Party. This includes but is not limited to issues such as crime, LGBT issues, immigration, and education, where Democrats are polling worse than they ever have before, partly due to COVID radicalizing parents, but also due to the party itself adopting stances it previously loudly eschewed.
At the end of the day, we can make deontological claims all we want but unfortunately, reality isn’t constructed by moral declarations. So I guess the end of this piece, like my newsletter on Vanderpump Rules, is “mainstream media delenda est.”
Great newsletter, and lots of good points here! I feel like Biden has allowed the media to define the narrative of his presidency,, which he barely articulates anymore (and which was never super compelling anyway, the whole "restoring the soul of the nation" thing). Do you think Biden has ceded the bully pulpit more than any recent president?