So lets see. 70 percent of the country wants the infrastructure bill that finally past this weekend. The same percentage if not more are glad we are out of Afghanistan. I'm sure investors are thrilled that the Market is at an all time high. And the vast majority of Americans (the sane ones) are thrilled that Covid is finally getting under control. This has all happened under the governance of the Democratic Party that controls Congress and the White House while the Republicans continue to vote no on everything. Yet the mainstream media continues to report that it's doom and gloom for the Democrats. How can anyone with a straight face refer to the press as having a liberal bias? The reality is that the owners of the media get their bread buttered from the Right. They have been and will continue to be the cheerleaders of the do nothing Republican Party. It's startling to see that the MSM does not care about the profit they might make if they were straight shooters with the news. If they did, perhaps I would still have a subscription to The NY Times and The Washington Post.
I was shocked that the markets didn’t tank with the strong jobs reports as they have in the past. They usually freaked out about full employment raising inflation. Clearly Wall Street isn’t freaking out about the real inflation (but almost certainly temporary) we are seeing now the way Republicans and the media are.
Seriously, why are they doing this crap? I'm sure those assholes are going to play down the real reason for inflation which is the global supply chain is having a series of shocks as people go back to the office as Covid-19 moves from the pandemic to endemic phase. What the political journalists in corporate media are doing isn't fake news, but very dishonest reporting to further a destructive agenda.
Those dual subheads on the Times story Saturday were so bad, some people on Twitter thought they were a joke.
And then on Sunday, there was Mo Dowd. I rarely read her columns, but every once in a while she has a Very Special One.
"Many who were sick of Trump chaos and ineptitude are now sick of Biden chaos and ineptitude. Scranton Joe was supposed to be the sensible, steady one.
After all, as Democrats are keenly aware, Trump lost the 2020 race as much as Biden won it. Only 44,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia saved Biden from an Electoral College tie.
And for a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.
"The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?"
There is so much wrong in just these four graphs alone. Ever since the publication of that stupid book Lucky, the media has run with the story that if it weren't for AZ and GA, Biden would have lost. This narrative is completely wrong. Biden had to win any combo of THREE out of FIVE states: PA, MI, WI, GA, AZ to win. Not ALL five to reach 270 but any THREE. And in PA it wasn't close. From the Philly Inquirer: "It’s now official: President-elect Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes, significantly larger than the 44,292-vote margin that helped carry President Donald Trump to the White House in 2016." But to tell the truth would interfere with the media narrative so they overlook this, either out of laziness or mendacity or a combination of both. Maybe they are all just really bad at math. (Yes, sarcasm, there.)
Phew, since he barely won election, it's nice to see Joe squandered his popularity over the same "chaos and ineptitude" that were the hallmarks of Trump's 4 years, as well as the ugliness of the "sausage making," which, as Dowd and the rest of the Beltway bozos know, is the norm in the legislative process. But somehow it's the Dems that made the normal "ugly."
Biden hasn't even been in office 10 full calendar months—42 weeks and a few days—and we seem to be finally getting a control over the pandemic thanks to the admin's vaccine roll out, the economy is adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, the stock market is rising even higher (yes, I know it's not Main Street, but the fact is the retirement savings of many of the people who live on Main Street is tied up with the market), we passed a trillion plus infrastructure bill, reduced child poverty by 40 percent, our precious darlings are back in school, etc—yet the nation is already exhausted from the "turmoil."
The column gets worse from there. She made fun of Nancy and Chuck calling the infrastructure legislation "transformative " ("transforming into what?" she so wittily asked) as well as Build Back Better itself, and then of course blames the Dems for sucking at messaging. She has the audacity to end by questioning whether Biden is actually up to the job of governing.
Dowd's bullshit encapsulates "wise" punditry, and everything that is wrong with the political media. The good news is that many of the readers' comments challenged MO and decried her and the rest of the coverage of this administration.
But with friends like these . . . the GOP needs to do nothing but sit back and laugh because all those "liberal" political journalists will do the heavy lifting for them.
"The good news is that many of the readers' comments challenged MO and decried her and the rest of the coverage of this administration."
Again and again we see that when it comes to the media. That the majority of the population actually agrees with Biden's administration, or how so many continue to push back against the media on some of the most outrageous stories (like the milk story).
Yet the media still continues to push these false or misleading narratives.
We say it's for clicks, or money, but maybe it's really because a lot of the members of the media really agree with Trump and the far right Conservative base.
I don't think they agree or are far right conservatives (though definitely some are more conservative leaning because taxes, since the creme de la creme are high earning individuals). I think they like being contrarian and don't like Dems because they are too serious and not "fun;" don't give reporters cute nicknames and court their egos; sound too smart; and are just grinds ("Ugh, who cares about policy?! BORING"—even though many of these same journalists went to top schools as well).
Media with the GOP are like catty teenage girls enthralled with the charismatic bad boys who are lazy, break the rules, get high in the bathroom, and give the adults the middle finger. Beltway journalists also like being "know-it-alls" because they are "in the room where it happens" aka the halls of Congress, at dinners and parties, and in Congressional offices. "So all of you who don't live in Washington, don't think to tell us how it works. You're not here. We are" is their mantra when they're criticized.
I kept looking for the headlines/op eds in the Sunday online papers about the triumph of the passing of the infrastructure bill and the real live, positive impacts it will have especially for workers w/o college degrees. No where to be found. Journalistic malpractice, malfeasance. As to Dowd, she seems to me to be a wanna be who never has a good word for anyone other than her R brother who writes her column once per year. I stopped reading her when she began to call Barack Obama Barry. Smarmy, snark. I’m beside myself at the obvious anti Biden/Dems bias of today’s msm. As an aside, Nicolle Wallace mentioned the criticism the press has gotten for not outlining, reporting about the parts of the bill. Progress? Maybe someone is listening? Thank you thank you thank you Eric. Great piece reflective of my outrage at the press’s coverage of the successful run so far of Biden et al. AND the evacuation out of Afghanistan was NOT a failure.
I found James Fallows’s comparison between headlines of the NY Times and Washington Post about the passage of the infrastructure bill, as well as his comments about the problem with the press treating politics like sports very interesting. The screen shot of the page from his 1997 book describing the same problems back then is striking — and depressing. He also links to your site.
Nowadays, it’s a combination of sports and reality television with the additional reporting focuses on the drama swirling around the political maneuvering.
I think the cause of what’s wrong with the press goes back to the time when the news side and profit sides were merged. Once the almighty dollar was in the drivers seat, the objectivity of the press was polluted by the profits and power of the suits in charge. The bottom line now is the bottom line. The hell with the country.
Not to nitpick but the “Biden in Crisis” narrative goes back to the spring of his administration when there was a surge of kids crossing the border from Mexico who were being held there for longer than he had promised. When the administration moved swiftly to speed up the processing — within the month there was an 80% drop in time spent in detention at the border — the problem quickly disappeared as did the reporting on the border issues. Instead of reporting on how the adminstration had solved the problem, the media moved on to the next overblown “crisis”.
This same pattern was repeated with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the added touch of the media’s lying about the administration not having had a plan to evacuate all those American citizens. As Rubin reported there was a State Department plan to quietly evacuate those people by sending them multiple warnings beginning in April to book flights out of the country before the withdrawal date. Those warnings came with offers to pay for the flights. This method was chosen to meet the Afghan government’s pleas to not conduct a blatant evacuation. That so many chose to ignore those warnings is on them, not the Biden administration.
You can bet that if Rubin was shown State’s documents detailing that operation, many in the media were also shown them. They just deliberately refused to inform the public because that would destroy their preferred narrative.
After the US managed to evacuated over 130,000 people in a short time — one of the largest mass evacuations in history — the media downplayed that impressive feat and moved on to the next story that would reinforce their “Biden is flailing and failing” story.
Don't forget Covid! (I've mentioned this before:) First, the media were offended by how ungracious Joe was to tout the distribution of vaccines without giving Trump his due credit for them. Then, since many high-profile people in the media were among the first to get vaccines, by spring the likes of Joe Scarborough et al were bitching to stop the mask wearing, even while most of us weren't eligible to get the first dose yet (depending on the state). I believe that the head of the CDC caved to this media pressure, which is why she announced "if your vaxxed you don't need to wear a mask" (overlooking that the "honor system" doesn't exist, especially among the recalcitrant Trumpkins). That then gave media the opening to accuse the administration of "chaotic and bad messaging," in addition to its "lying" about the "crisis at the border" you mention above. And the Delta spikes were all because of Joe's bad messaging—not because of recalcitrant Trumpkins encouraged by the GOP.
Simple math debunks the milk story. Clearly the CNN editor was too enamored with the inflation BS to notice. Every time there is a Dem in the Oval Office we hear about "runaway inflation" and how worried people are about their guns being confiscated. Republican fantasies being legitimized by a lazy press corps.
The industry that treats its own members like garbage (layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts, five gigs to survive, more layoffs, fired for a tweet you made in high school, etc) is now treating the American public the same way.
The point about the glossing-over of the milk family's federal assistance was excellent. CNN found that fact unhelpful to their narrative. CNN and other news outlets have to decide whether they are in the biography business or the memoir business.
That's what happened here in the Philippines under the late former president Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III. Anytime there was news of positive economic growth happening in my country (Philippines), the media would downplay the administration's role in improving the economy through its policies and reforms. On social media, some people would claim the real credit for the economic growth belonged to his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Although, there wasn't overarching narrative to portray Aquino as total failure, the media coverage of his presidency was critical sometimes to point of being uneccessarily harsh & mean-spirited. That's why I don't understand why the American corporate mainstream media are behaving like reality TV producers trying to frame Biden's presidency as a failure. Covering the chaos of the Trump administration was "fun" for many of them, but the emphasis on palace intrigue and drama ended up downplaying the policy disasters which is what they were supposed to be reporting about in the first place. Seriously, why can't the talking heads and wannabe pundits (I'm looking at you Tapper, Bash, Scarborough, Geist, etc, etc.) prioritize actually reporting the story rather than framing it to their Beltway tabloid reporter narrative.
James Fallows in a long time media critic who also has a great site. I have followed him ever since he wrote about how the media misrepresented the Clinton healthcare plan, helping to tank it. Today’s column has a screen shot from his 1997 book “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermines American Democracy”. That expert describes the same problems we struggle with today. He also links to this site was well as others who cover the media’s destructive games. I urge everyone to read Fallows and the others he lists.
I’m familiar with Fallows because he wrote a lengthy piece in the Atlantic about my country (the Philippines) back in the mid-Eighties where he described Filipino culture as “damaged.” Back then, many Filipinos didn’t agree with his very blunt assessment. More than thirty years later, many here are starting to agree with him.
There can be a difference in essence between inflation and gouging, as the current spike in heating oil prices shows. Deliberately failing to make seasonal adjustments is not the invisible hand. One more for the list of failures of the elite press drumming up a story line.
And, of course, we can always count on Politico Playbook to keep pushing the narrative with a backhanded compliment. Their headline this morning: "Big obstacles await Biden after big win"
It is long past time for her to get the sack. She should have been shown the door when she accused Gore of being so “feminized” that he was “practically lactating”. Her complaint was that he was too concerned about the environment! Stupid and misogynistic all in one. People need to stop reading her poison. If that happens the Times will give her to boot.
You underestimate the ability of the media to find the dark cloud around every silver lining. The same time email from Press Run about the good news arrived, AOL was running this story from the AP:
"...Coming at the end of a particularly difficult week in which his party suffered surprise losses up and down the ballot in elections nationwide, passage of the legislation was a respite from a challenging few months for an embattled president whose poll numbers have dropped as Americans remain frustrated with the coronavirus pandemic and an uneven economic recovery.
But the legislative win sets up a series of challenges for Biden, both in promoting the new deal and at the same time continuing to push for a long-argued-over $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate bill, which would dramatically expand health, family and climate change programs.
The stakes for Biden are clear in his sagging poll numbers.
Priorities USA, a Democratic big money group, warned in a memo this past week that “voters are frustrated, skeptical, and tired — of COVID, of economic hardship, of school closings, of higher prices and stagnant wages, of unaffordable prescription drugs and health care and more.”
“Without results (and effectively communicating those results), voters will punish the party in power,” chairman Guy Cecil said."
That last point is true - and getting that good news message out is something the mainstream media will feel duty-bound to counter in every way for 'balance'.
Check out the different way the WaPo and the NY Times headlines framed the story about the passage of the infrastructure bill. The Post often drives me crazy but at least they have regularly columnists like Jennifer Rubin, the Plum Line writers Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman and the ex-Times’s public editor Margaret Sullivan. All of them frequently speak out against the mainstream media’s games.
One of my kvetches going back at least to the 2008 financial collapse is that mainstream economic reporting is ~100% dishonest. Even if they get facts straight and in some sort of context, the effect is of the media BS'ing their audiences. Covering for the flaws of an exploitative, extractive economy is another thing the mainstream is wed to.
An as for the CNN disgrace, well, it's far more a matter of degree than of type of coverage.
And something to meditate on: Trump's low poll numbers resulted from his acts, Biden's from brutal, lousy reporting (cf the Afghanistan pullout; books will be written laying out what a disgraceful job the media did on that and the war and, indeed, what's called national security generally). And note that however bad the coverage of Trump was -- not everything could have gotten the kid's glove treatment -- the mainstream far more normalized a literally murderous POTUS than criticized like a historically unfit POTUS warranted.
The media has been like that since at least since they refused to call out Reagan for his supply-side fairytale about tax cuts for the rich that would magically pay for themselves. The media held him up as a big economic success, ignoring the fact that he nearly tripled our national debt. The media later spent the early 90s carping about the debt and reporting on the doomsday debt clock. Then after Clinton and the Democrats — only the Democrats — raised taxes on upper incomes we not only had a balanced budget but a significant surplus that was paying off the national debt the media ignored the story. Gore ran on continuing that policy; Bush explicitly ran on destroying the surplus with tax cuts. The media swooned over Bush because they thought he was “more fun to have a beer with”; they trashed Gore for being too focused on serious issues.
It reaches beyond the press VA Rep. Spanberger has been a broken record by giving interviews and going on MTP to proclaim Biden cause McAuliff's loss because he's pulled a switcheroo: VA elected him to end the chaos & be moderate yet he's gone rogue, pushing a progressive agenda. (Donna Edwards immediately set the record straight.)
So lets see. 70 percent of the country wants the infrastructure bill that finally past this weekend. The same percentage if not more are glad we are out of Afghanistan. I'm sure investors are thrilled that the Market is at an all time high. And the vast majority of Americans (the sane ones) are thrilled that Covid is finally getting under control. This has all happened under the governance of the Democratic Party that controls Congress and the White House while the Republicans continue to vote no on everything. Yet the mainstream media continues to report that it's doom and gloom for the Democrats. How can anyone with a straight face refer to the press as having a liberal bias? The reality is that the owners of the media get their bread buttered from the Right. They have been and will continue to be the cheerleaders of the do nothing Republican Party. It's startling to see that the MSM does not care about the profit they might make if they were straight shooters with the news. If they did, perhaps I would still have a subscription to The NY Times and The Washington Post.
and I’m sure the stock market will celebrate infrastructure bill today
Yep, Markets are up early.
I was shocked that the markets didn’t tank with the strong jobs reports as they have in the past. They usually freaked out about full employment raising inflation. Clearly Wall Street isn’t freaking out about the real inflation (but almost certainly temporary) we are seeing now the way Republicans and the media are.
Oh don’t worry Times already has a piece about heating costs expected to go up and increasing the inflation drama.
Seriously, why are they doing this crap? I'm sure those assholes are going to play down the real reason for inflation which is the global supply chain is having a series of shocks as people go back to the office as Covid-19 moves from the pandemic to endemic phase. What the political journalists in corporate media are doing isn't fake news, but very dishonest reporting to further a destructive agenda.
Those dual subheads on the Times story Saturday were so bad, some people on Twitter thought they were a joke.
And then on Sunday, there was Mo Dowd. I rarely read her columns, but every once in a while she has a Very Special One.
"Many who were sick of Trump chaos and ineptitude are now sick of Biden chaos and ineptitude. Scranton Joe was supposed to be the sensible, steady one.
After all, as Democrats are keenly aware, Trump lost the 2020 race as much as Biden won it. Only 44,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia saved Biden from an Electoral College tie.
And for a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.
"The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?"
There is so much wrong in just these four graphs alone. Ever since the publication of that stupid book Lucky, the media has run with the story that if it weren't for AZ and GA, Biden would have lost. This narrative is completely wrong. Biden had to win any combo of THREE out of FIVE states: PA, MI, WI, GA, AZ to win. Not ALL five to reach 270 but any THREE. And in PA it wasn't close. From the Philly Inquirer: "It’s now official: President-elect Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes, significantly larger than the 44,292-vote margin that helped carry President Donald Trump to the White House in 2016." But to tell the truth would interfere with the media narrative so they overlook this, either out of laziness or mendacity or a combination of both. Maybe they are all just really bad at math. (Yes, sarcasm, there.)
Phew, since he barely won election, it's nice to see Joe squandered his popularity over the same "chaos and ineptitude" that were the hallmarks of Trump's 4 years, as well as the ugliness of the "sausage making," which, as Dowd and the rest of the Beltway bozos know, is the norm in the legislative process. But somehow it's the Dems that made the normal "ugly."
Biden hasn't even been in office 10 full calendar months—42 weeks and a few days—and we seem to be finally getting a control over the pandemic thanks to the admin's vaccine roll out, the economy is adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month, the stock market is rising even higher (yes, I know it's not Main Street, but the fact is the retirement savings of many of the people who live on Main Street is tied up with the market), we passed a trillion plus infrastructure bill, reduced child poverty by 40 percent, our precious darlings are back in school, etc—yet the nation is already exhausted from the "turmoil."
The column gets worse from there. She made fun of Nancy and Chuck calling the infrastructure legislation "transformative " ("transforming into what?" she so wittily asked) as well as Build Back Better itself, and then of course blames the Dems for sucking at messaging. She has the audacity to end by questioning whether Biden is actually up to the job of governing.
Dowd's bullshit encapsulates "wise" punditry, and everything that is wrong with the political media. The good news is that many of the readers' comments challenged MO and decried her and the rest of the coverage of this administration.
But with friends like these . . . the GOP needs to do nothing but sit back and laugh because all those "liberal" political journalists will do the heavy lifting for them.
idea of Biden as chaos agent is just so bonkers
"The good news is that many of the readers' comments challenged MO and decried her and the rest of the coverage of this administration."
Again and again we see that when it comes to the media. That the majority of the population actually agrees with Biden's administration, or how so many continue to push back against the media on some of the most outrageous stories (like the milk story).
Yet the media still continues to push these false or misleading narratives.
We say it's for clicks, or money, but maybe it's really because a lot of the members of the media really agree with Trump and the far right Conservative base.
I don't think they agree or are far right conservatives (though definitely some are more conservative leaning because taxes, since the creme de la creme are high earning individuals). I think they like being contrarian and don't like Dems because they are too serious and not "fun;" don't give reporters cute nicknames and court their egos; sound too smart; and are just grinds ("Ugh, who cares about policy?! BORING"—even though many of these same journalists went to top schools as well).
Media with the GOP are like catty teenage girls enthralled with the charismatic bad boys who are lazy, break the rules, get high in the bathroom, and give the adults the middle finger. Beltway journalists also like being "know-it-alls" because they are "in the room where it happens" aka the halls of Congress, at dinners and parties, and in Congressional offices. "So all of you who don't live in Washington, don't think to tell us how it works. You're not here. We are" is their mantra when they're criticized.
It’s as though the msm is rooting against the country rather than doing its job FOR the country.
I kept looking for the headlines/op eds in the Sunday online papers about the triumph of the passing of the infrastructure bill and the real live, positive impacts it will have especially for workers w/o college degrees. No where to be found. Journalistic malpractice, malfeasance. As to Dowd, she seems to me to be a wanna be who never has a good word for anyone other than her R brother who writes her column once per year. I stopped reading her when she began to call Barack Obama Barry. Smarmy, snark. I’m beside myself at the obvious anti Biden/Dems bias of today’s msm. As an aside, Nicolle Wallace mentioned the criticism the press has gotten for not outlining, reporting about the parts of the bill. Progress? Maybe someone is listening? Thank you thank you thank you Eric. Great piece reflective of my outrage at the press’s coverage of the successful run so far of Biden et al. AND the evacuation out of Afghanistan was NOT a failure.
yes, the press really seems married to their script
I found James Fallows’s comparison between headlines of the NY Times and Washington Post about the passage of the infrastructure bill, as well as his comments about the problem with the press treating politics like sports very interesting. The screen shot of the page from his 1997 book describing the same problems back then is striking — and depressing. He also links to your site.
Nowadays, it’s a combination of sports and reality television with the additional reporting focuses on the drama swirling around the political maneuvering.
I think the cause of what’s wrong with the press goes back to the time when the news side and profit sides were merged. Once the almighty dollar was in the drivers seat, the objectivity of the press was polluted by the profits and power of the suits in charge. The bottom line now is the bottom line. The hell with the country.
Agreed, I've actually pointed out that issue of treating the news as a profit center rather than a public good on previous Press Run entry.
Not to nitpick but the “Biden in Crisis” narrative goes back to the spring of his administration when there was a surge of kids crossing the border from Mexico who were being held there for longer than he had promised. When the administration moved swiftly to speed up the processing — within the month there was an 80% drop in time spent in detention at the border — the problem quickly disappeared as did the reporting on the border issues. Instead of reporting on how the adminstration had solved the problem, the media moved on to the next overblown “crisis”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/02/hey-what-happened-border-crisis/
This same pattern was repeated with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the added touch of the media’s lying about the administration not having had a plan to evacuate all those American citizens. As Rubin reported there was a State Department plan to quietly evacuate those people by sending them multiple warnings beginning in April to book flights out of the country before the withdrawal date. Those warnings came with offers to pay for the flights. This method was chosen to meet the Afghan government’s pleas to not conduct a blatant evacuation. That so many chose to ignore those warnings is on them, not the Biden administration.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/30/how-evacuation-americans-is-going/
You can bet that if Rubin was shown State’s documents detailing that operation, many in the media were also shown them. They just deliberately refused to inform the public because that would destroy their preferred narrative.
After the US managed to evacuated over 130,000 people in a short time — one of the largest mass evacuations in history — the media downplayed that impressive feat and moved on to the next story that would reinforce their “Biden is flailing and failing” story.
Oh yep, good pt re: border
Excellent points.
Don't forget Covid! (I've mentioned this before:) First, the media were offended by how ungracious Joe was to tout the distribution of vaccines without giving Trump his due credit for them. Then, since many high-profile people in the media were among the first to get vaccines, by spring the likes of Joe Scarborough et al were bitching to stop the mask wearing, even while most of us weren't eligible to get the first dose yet (depending on the state). I believe that the head of the CDC caved to this media pressure, which is why she announced "if your vaxxed you don't need to wear a mask" (overlooking that the "honor system" doesn't exist, especially among the recalcitrant Trumpkins). That then gave media the opening to accuse the administration of "chaotic and bad messaging," in addition to its "lying" about the "crisis at the border" you mention above. And the Delta spikes were all because of Joe's bad messaging—not because of recalcitrant Trumpkins encouraged by the GOP.
Simple math debunks the milk story. Clearly the CNN editor was too enamored with the inflation BS to notice. Every time there is a Dem in the Oval Office we hear about "runaway inflation" and how worried people are about their guns being confiscated. Republican fantasies being legitimized by a lazy press corps.
The industry that treats its own members like garbage (layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts, five gigs to survive, more layoffs, fired for a tweet you made in high school, etc) is now treating the American public the same way.
The point about the glossing-over of the milk family's federal assistance was excellent. CNN found that fact unhelpful to their narrative. CNN and other news outlets have to decide whether they are in the biography business or the memoir business.
That's what happened here in the Philippines under the late former president Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III. Anytime there was news of positive economic growth happening in my country (Philippines), the media would downplay the administration's role in improving the economy through its policies and reforms. On social media, some people would claim the real credit for the economic growth belonged to his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Although, there wasn't overarching narrative to portray Aquino as total failure, the media coverage of his presidency was critical sometimes to point of being uneccessarily harsh & mean-spirited. That's why I don't understand why the American corporate mainstream media are behaving like reality TV producers trying to frame Biden's presidency as a failure. Covering the chaos of the Trump administration was "fun" for many of them, but the emphasis on palace intrigue and drama ended up downplaying the policy disasters which is what they were supposed to be reporting about in the first place. Seriously, why can't the talking heads and wannabe pundits (I'm looking at you Tapper, Bash, Scarborough, Geist, etc, etc.) prioritize actually reporting the story rather than framing it to their Beltway tabloid reporter narrative.
Kevin Drum had this observation about how horrible Biden has been: https://jabberwocking.com/just-how-horrible-and-incompetent-has-joe-biden-been/
What a great blog, and had no idea. Thanks for the information.
James Fallows in a long time media critic who also has a great site. I have followed him ever since he wrote about how the media misrepresented the Clinton healthcare plan, helping to tank it. Today’s column has a screen shot from his 1997 book “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermines American Democracy”. That expert describes the same problems we struggle with today. He also links to this site was well as others who cover the media’s destructive games. I urge everyone to read Fallows and the others he lists.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/politics-as-sports-why-it-matters?
I’m familiar with Fallows because he wrote a lengthy piece in the Atlantic about my country (the Philippines) back in the mid-Eighties where he described Filipino culture as “damaged.” Back then, many Filipinos didn’t agree with his very blunt assessment. More than thirty years later, many here are starting to agree with him.
Fallows is very smart. I also subscribe and have been reading him (and his books) for years.
And he’s pitch perfect humor wise.
Thanks for posting the link. It's both an informative and depressing article.
Kevin Drum is wonderful. He retired from Mother Jones at the end of January, but lucky for us continues to share his insights.
There can be a difference in essence between inflation and gouging, as the current spike in heating oil prices shows. Deliberately failing to make seasonal adjustments is not the invisible hand. One more for the list of failures of the elite press drumming up a story line.
And, of course, we can always count on Politico Playbook to keep pushing the narrative with a backhanded compliment. Their headline this morning: "Big obstacles await Biden after big win"
And of course Maureen Dowd predictably dials the snark up to 11.
It is long past time for her to get the sack. She should have been shown the door when she accused Gore of being so “feminized” that he was “practically lactating”. Her complaint was that he was too concerned about the environment! Stupid and misogynistic all in one. People need to stop reading her poison. If that happens the Times will give her to boot.
You underestimate the ability of the media to find the dark cloud around every silver lining. The same time email from Press Run about the good news arrived, AOL was running this story from the AP:
"...Coming at the end of a particularly difficult week in which his party suffered surprise losses up and down the ballot in elections nationwide, passage of the legislation was a respite from a challenging few months for an embattled president whose poll numbers have dropped as Americans remain frustrated with the coronavirus pandemic and an uneven economic recovery.
But the legislative win sets up a series of challenges for Biden, both in promoting the new deal and at the same time continuing to push for a long-argued-over $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate bill, which would dramatically expand health, family and climate change programs.
The stakes for Biden are clear in his sagging poll numbers.
Priorities USA, a Democratic big money group, warned in a memo this past week that “voters are frustrated, skeptical, and tired — of COVID, of economic hardship, of school closings, of higher prices and stagnant wages, of unaffordable prescription drugs and health care and more.”
“Without results (and effectively communicating those results), voters will punish the party in power,” chairman Guy Cecil said."
That last point is true - and getting that good news message out is something the mainstream media will feel duty-bound to counter in every way for 'balance'.
https://www.aol.com/news/biden-faces-fresh-challenges-infrastructure-050328752-133646313.html
Check out the different way the WaPo and the NY Times headlines framed the story about the passage of the infrastructure bill. The Post often drives me crazy but at least they have regularly columnists like Jennifer Rubin, the Plum Line writers Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman and the ex-Times’s public editor Margaret Sullivan. All of them frequently speak out against the mainstream media’s games.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/politics-as-sports-why-it-matters?
I agree. Rubin, Sargent, Waldman and Sullivan are excellent.
One of my kvetches going back at least to the 2008 financial collapse is that mainstream economic reporting is ~100% dishonest. Even if they get facts straight and in some sort of context, the effect is of the media BS'ing their audiences. Covering for the flaws of an exploitative, extractive economy is another thing the mainstream is wed to.
An as for the CNN disgrace, well, it's far more a matter of degree than of type of coverage.
And something to meditate on: Trump's low poll numbers resulted from his acts, Biden's from brutal, lousy reporting (cf the Afghanistan pullout; books will be written laying out what a disgraceful job the media did on that and the war and, indeed, what's called national security generally). And note that however bad the coverage of Trump was -- not everything could have gotten the kid's glove treatment -- the mainstream far more normalized a literally murderous POTUS than criticized like a historically unfit POTUS warranted.
The media has been like that since at least since they refused to call out Reagan for his supply-side fairytale about tax cuts for the rich that would magically pay for themselves. The media held him up as a big economic success, ignoring the fact that he nearly tripled our national debt. The media later spent the early 90s carping about the debt and reporting on the doomsday debt clock. Then after Clinton and the Democrats — only the Democrats — raised taxes on upper incomes we not only had a balanced budget but a significant surplus that was paying off the national debt the media ignored the story. Gore ran on continuing that policy; Bush explicitly ran on destroying the surplus with tax cuts. The media swooned over Bush because they thought he was “more fun to have a beer with”; they trashed Gore for being too focused on serious issues.
And as I take a look at the Post this morning what do I see but a lengthy love letter for Moscow Mitch?
It reaches beyond the press VA Rep. Spanberger has been a broken record by giving interviews and going on MTP to proclaim Biden cause McAuliff's loss because he's pulled a switcheroo: VA elected him to end the chaos & be moderate yet he's gone rogue, pushing a progressive agenda. (Donna Edwards immediately set the record straight.)