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Worked vs. woke

Former basketball coach Bobby Knight.

Dems in disarray is evergreen. Democrats win? Bad news for Democrats. Democrats lose? Badder news for Democrats. Win, lose, or draw, Democrats are always in disarray. There’s always a diner somewhere outside a major metropolitan area that citified reporters can mine for anti-left sentiment in a John Deere hat to feature on Page 1.

Liberals may or may not have a “woke” problem, but the press on the whole is “worked.” What the blogosphere once called the conservatives’ mighty Wurlitzer (first coined by the CIA) propaganda machine has so thoroughly worked the refs that the press has internalized notions such as “this is a center-right country” and that Republicans represent Real America whether or not news rooms consciously recognize it.

That critique underlies Eric Boehlert’s work at Press Run, Dan Froomkin’s at Press Watch, and in other places. In the wake of last week’s Dems in disarray headlines, Boehlert lays out what the disarrayed, underpowered Democratic majority accomplished last week in spite of itself:

Three events unraveled the Biden Doomsday narrative on Friday. A white-hot jobs report not only counted more than 530,000 new jobs created in the month of October, but the Labor Department revised its estimates for September and August and confirmed an additional 235,000 positions were created — or 766,000 U.S. jobs we didn’t know about until Friday. That shocker naturally sent to the Dow Jones upward, ending the day at yet another all-time high under Biden, 36,327. Since he was elected last year, the stock market is up a jaw-dropping 40 percent, and has created $14 trillion in new wealth.

Then as the clock ticked down Friday night, Democrats passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, the largest transportation package in U.S. history. The sprawling and historic legislation will produce hundreds of thousands of union jobs, transform the nation’s transportation system and represents the largest passenger rail, roads and bridges investment in 70 years.

All of this while the number of U.S. Covid deaths continue to plummet, the vaccination rate climbs, including among children, and Pfizer just announced a new pill — Paxlovid — that cuts the risk of hospitalization or death for Covid patients by nearly 90 percent. “The end of the pandemic is now in clear view, and secure,” says Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner.

Combined, the three Friday wins produced the type of day most sitting presidents dream about. They also came amidst a premature funeral procession, eagerly sponsored by the media, which featured an avalanche of doomsday pronouncements following disappointing Democratic election showings in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday.  (See herehereherehereherehereherehereherehere, and here.)

Because what bleeds leads.

The jobs report got buried on the Washington Post’s and on CNN’s websites Friday afternoon, Boehlert writes. In case you didn’t know, America feels “gloomy” under Biden according to the New York Times.

This is what happens when the press becomes wed to a gotcha storyline. The doomsday narrative took hold in August when the U.S. troop pullout in Afghanistan exploded into a weeks-long story, and was covered almost universally as a cataclysmic failure, even though the Biden administration not only ended the Forever War for America, but oversaw the largest, most efficient wartime evacuation in history, spiriting 120,000 Afghans out of the country. Nonetheless, the press was sure it was the White House’s “summer from hell” and that Biden was in a political “free fall.”

The media’s obsession with dinging Biden has produced some truly regrettable journalism. CNN’s infamous milk report last week was among the worst.

That on top of Virginia reporting Froomkin critiqued last week ahead of former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) Tuesday loss:

The man who New York Times national political reporter Jeremy Peters selected on Sunday to exemplify his thesis about ordinary Virginians voting Republican due to their “dissatisfaction with the political culture” turned out not to be an ordinary Virginian at all.

Peters quoted Glenn Miller calling himself as a “Hillary-Biden voter,” and wrote that Miller recently reached a “tipping point” that led him to attend a rally for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin.

After Peters tweeted out his story, a little sleuthery by journalist Jonathan M. Katz quickly identified Miller as a prolific Republican donor and an activist foe of the (nonexistent) teaching of “critical race theory” in pubic [sic] schools.

When Katz’s criticism caught the editors’ attention, they tried to correct the piece and got that wrong too, and “in some ways even wronger,” Froomkin continues, citing journalist Magdi Semrau.

“The media love their Biden Doomsday narrative,” Boehlert writes. “But the facts on the ground are changing and the press needs to catch up.”

Are there no coffee houses?

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