Eric Boehlert’s great newsletter Press Run made an excellent observation about the mainstream media’s apparent desire to turn Joe Biden into Donald Trump. He quotes some journalists saying that they miss the drama and points out that this has led them to create drama around Biden just to keep the juices flowing. The egregious coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal is the best example but they’ve done it in a dozen different ways.
I get the impulse. The Trump administration was a daily assault on the senses, a train wreck you couldn’t look away from. Now it’s frustrating sausage making on a good day and depressing news about the pandemic on a bad one. The intense daily drama of the Trump years has given way to the familiar slog of partisan warfare and it’s tempting to look away. And that’s exactly what many people are doing.
Boehlert writes:
Call it the Trump slump, which followed the Trump bump. Between October 2020 and October 2021, according to Nielsen data, CNN ratings were down 73 percent, MSNBC was down 56 percent, and Fox News had fallen 53 percent, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. The same grim statistics can be found for sagging news sites.
Certainly traffic here is down significantly, as I expected it would be. Election years always bring more readers and there is a drop off afterwards. This one is more precipitous than usual but I also expected that due to the intense interest last year with both the pandemic and the post election lunacy.
I understand. But I hope that people don’t tune out completely. We have a major crisis on our hands whether people want to deal with it or not and it’s going to require that we remain informed and engaged or the consequences could be disastrous. I’m speaking of the assault on democracy that continues apace all over the country, led by Donald Trump and his henchmen. Just because he isn’t active your twitter feed or on TV everyday shouting over Marine One doesn’t mean he’s gone away.
Here’s an example of what he’s sending out to his tens of millions of followers every day:
If you think this propaganda, endorsed and disseminated by the right wing media, isn’t a threat you need to re-think it.
So, I hope that as depressing as it might be that you’ll stop by here from time to time to get a sense of where this is going. We try to synthesize the news in ways that get to the heart of the matter, remind you of the stakes and hopefully, provide some insight about how to deal with it.
We read everything so you don’t have to. Blogs are an old-fashioned medium now, but they still serve a purpose. We are here every day, following the news cycle from an outsider perspective.
If you’d like to support this site in its mission I would be most grateful if you would hit one of the buttons below or use the address on the sidebar to help us keep the lights on.
And Happy Hollandaise everyone!