The “liberal media” certainly does a shoddy job of promoting the left. So much so that another “bad news for Biden” article from Politico over the weekend set off press critic Dan Froomkin.
Sam Stein tweeted, “A shocking data point that explains much of Biden’s political troubles. More people think jobs have been lost over the last year (37%) than those who think they’ve been gained (28%). Unemployment is at 3.6%.”
Froomkin linked to one of his Press Watch posts from March and replied, “Hey @samstein! When the public thinks up is down, it’s time to rethink coverage”
Froomkin’s post begins:
Imagine you’re the editor of a major national news organization and you learn that the general public is terribly misinformed about an important issue that your reporters cover intensely — say you see poll results showing that a lot of people believe something that is diametrically opposed to the truth.
You’d probably call a meeting. You’d say: “Hey, what we’re doing isn’t working.” You’d ask: “What are we doing wrong?” And once you figured out, you’d say: “Well, let’s stop that. Let’s try something else.”:
But you aren’t the editor of a major national news organization, are you.
And what they say is: “Whatever.”
In assessing why voters get wrong basic economic facts, Froomkin looks to Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) economist Dean Baker who wrote in November, “The nonstop hype of ‘inflation, inflation, inflation’ unsurprisingly leads many people to believe inflation is a really big problem, even if their own finances are pretty good, because they hear all those wise reporters at CNN, NPR, the NYT and elsewhere telling them it’s a really big problem.”
Baker, commenting on the press’ doomsday narrative, tweeted in November, “I have never seen such a one-sided hit job on a U.S. president (foreign leaders maybe).” In a later Substack interview, Baker said (and Froomkin quotes):
The media has basically branded Biden as a failure.
They’ve substituted this “failure” branding for reality again and again. And Afghanistan is probably the most dramatic example. It’s true that Biden made a serious blunder with his foolish statement that we wouldn’t see a Vietnam-style collapse and evacuation—I’m not sure whether Biden got bad information or actually ignored good information. But the media routinely refers to the withdrawal as disastrous when in reality Biden managed to get somewhere around 120,000 people out of the country in the span of two to three weeks—that’s truly remarkable and far more than most observers had thought possible. So rather than giving Biden credit on a remarkably successful evacuation performance, the media pushed the idea that the withdrawal was a disaster.
In fact, the economic recovery under Biden has been just short of miraculous: unprecedented wage hikes, more freedom to switch jobs for better pay and conditions.
And yet we hear almost none of this positive story. Most families actually have a considerably higher inflation-adjusted income now than they had before the pandemic, but the media talks about inflation all the time and gives us endless stories of inflation-caused hardship—it makes no sense to say that people were doing well in 2019 and that people are now experiencing great hardship, since people’s real incomes are actually higher now.
Eric Boehlert at Press Run has the same complaint this morning: Biden is on pace for 10 million new jobs and tumbling unemployment in two years compared to Trump’s three million lost in four years. And yet?
The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)
Just look at the relentlessly dour economic coverage. For the press, inflation remains the dominant, bad-news-for-Dems economic story. Even on Friday, the day the stellar jobs report was released, “inflation” was mentioned on cable news nearly as often as “jobs,” according to TVeyes.com.
I’ve complained lately about bitter, leftier-than-thou activists who insist on finding a dark cloud in every silver lining. They cannot understand why no one wants to jump on their bad news bandwagon. If that’s what’s meant by liberal media, well, perhaps there are job opportunities there.
Boehlert might agree. Inspecting another set of “bad news for Biden” economic headlines from the weekend, he throws up his hands, writing, “The president announces another blockbuster jobs report and the press presents it as borderline bad news.” Or buries it 87 headlines down the page.
Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.
With a large (hopefully diminishing) fraction of the country slapped Chinatown silly by propaganda and conspiracy theories over the last several decades, they’ll believe anything they are told no matter how contradictory. Like, unemployment is the highest it’s been in 40 years and there’s a labor shortage.
Reporting should be clarifying. It is not. Not often enough. The press wants its horse race.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.