Here’s a heretical idea: biased media outlets are unwittingly the Democratic Party’s worst “friend or foe.”
The line of reasoning that leads to this proposition goes like this: Last month, Princeton professor Loren Wright wrote in The Atlantic:The benefits of liberal college campuses for conservative studentsWright’s argument was simple: Conservative students are constantly challenged at a predominantly left-leaning university, so they work harder to learn how to defend their opinions, become more informed about all points of view on an issue, and become more determined.
Democrats should ask themselves whether having an overly friendly media is worse than having a Republican enemy.
In contrast, Wright noted, liberal students tend to be complacent, intellectually lazy, and ignorant of other points of view. This is precisely because liberal campuses do not encourage liberal students to think critically about their opinions. In his article, Wright detailed how conservative Princeton students are more knowledgeable and well-rounded than their liberal counterparts. This paradoxical fact that conservative students thrive on left-leaning campuses is well known to conservatives, but apparently no one else.
This analysis likely applies to mainstream news media as well. After all, elite outlets like the New York TimesThe newspapers are dominated by liberals educated at liberal Ivy League universities, and journalists bring the ideological laziness and narrow-mindedness of their campus bubbles into the newsroom, producing highly conformist narratives that distort reality.
It is now beyond debate that corporate media “reporting” favors Democrats and liberal viewpoints. What no one questions is whether this bias is actually it hurts Just as one-sided university curricula have a negative impact on the education of liberal students, the Democratic and liberal causes are at odds.
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race after clearly and undeniably revealing his age-related impairments during the June 27 debate is a case that should be taught in journalism schools for decades to come, but probably won’t be. Before the Atlanta debate, any major media outlet that dared to question Biden’s age and apparent mental decline was denounced by other “respectable” major media outlets.
When The Wall Street Journal published a detailed story in early June about Biden’s “deterioration” mentally, the paper drew furious criticism from other media outlets.
The mainstream media allowed themselves to be used as a preaching belt to convey the White House talking point that the video of Biden’s debilitating physical and mental abilities was a “cheap fake.” Conservative media reports were subjected to endless “fact-checks,” with claims about Biden’s disabilities found to be false or “misleading.” The New York Times and Washington Post used the word “misleading” in headlines debunking the mounting visual evidence.
Hiding Biden’s decline is not the only example of the media pushing the Democratic Party’s agenda. In 2022, NBC News reporter Dasha Barnes wrote: Report John Fetterman, a U.S. Senate candidate from Pennsylvania whose health after a severe stroke was ignored by the media, was struggling to carry on a basic conversation.
As if to quote from Ring Lardner’s novel The Young Immigrant, the media told Burns, “Shut up, they explained.”
The point is that the White House’s long-running cover-up of Biden’s decline could have been revealed as early as 2021, but only because a compliant liberal media went along with the cover-up. Leading Democrats in Congress knew about Biden’s problems, but couldn’t say much about them as long as the media defended him.
What will happen if the Trump campaign starts running ads educating voters about Harris’ past extreme positions?
What did this mean for the Democrats? After the June 27 debate, when Biden’s decline became too obvious to ignore, the media quickly turned against him. If the media had done their job and reported on Biden’s decline a year ago, Democrats might have been able to convince him to step aside, or to provoke some prominent Democratic officeholders to seriously challenge him. That might have given Democrats time to select a strong candidate through the normal nomination process and run a coherent campaign.
Instead, the Democratic Party is now in crisis mode and will likely be forced to accept Kamala Harris as its nominee, despite the fact that she has never won a primary in the 2020 election cycle and has lower approval ratings than Biden.
Rather, she Had Harris had a lower approval rating than Biden until the media came to their senses and decided to do everything in their power to back Harris, once again massively covering up Harris’ far-left record, wiping out her record, and swallowing her new position that she was not a “border czar”, etc.
Is the media making the same mistake with Kamala Harris that they did with Biden? They are doing her and the Democratic Party no favors by treating her nicely and giving her glowing coverage. (Los Angeles Times)A typical example would be to run an article along the lines of, “Kamala Harris is a chef and knows LA restaurants well. Will that help her win?” Think of it as a pie crust article, perhaps.
So Harris is enjoying a lovely honeymoon with voters, riding a wave of lame-duck media and suddenly tying the polls with Trump, but what happens when the Trump campaign starts running ads educating voters about Harris’ past radical positions on banning fracking, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, defunding the police, free bail for rioters, and nationalizing health care?
The election could be a rematch of 1988, when relatively unknown Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis tried to hide his liberal record. At this point in 1988, Dukakis was leading George H. W. Bush by 17 points, but once the public learned of his record, he lost by 8 points in November.
Democrats should ask themselves whether having an overly friendly media is worse than having a Republican enemy, as it shields them from true public opinion and leaves them vulnerable to effective Republican attacks. And the corporate legacy media might ask themselves whether it serves their ideological interests, let alone their credibility, when they reveal themselves to be signed Democratic operatives rather than taking an antagonistic stance against those in power.
Democracy dies in darkness, The Washington Post tells us, but media credibility dies in partisanship.
Editor’s note: a Version This article originally appeared on PowerLine.
