The Blind Eye of the Beltway

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! I hope everyone browses the other articles here and gains enlightenment in some form. Also, why the hell didn't Barbie win for Best Set Design?! I mean, they used ALL that pink...! 

One of the reasons for my apprehension about this 2024 presidential cycle is how the mainstream media - the Beltway (Washington) punditry leading the Fourth Estate that overwhelms our awareness - is mishandling the entire thing as a personality horse race: Between an elderly Democratic white guy the Beltway is deeming too old, and an enraged bullying Republican white guy (who's not that much older, and showing more signs of dementia) facing criminal charges across four different court rooms threatening to impose a dictatorship on Day One.

Try to guess which issue the esteemed Beltway expresses a more pressing concern. /headdesk

And try to remember how this all feels so similar to how that Beltway - now older, but still operating with the same hive-mind "Both Sideism" world view - mishandled the 2016 presidential cycle, which proved disastrous. I wrote back in 2017 how the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review evaluated the media's performance and found it biased - obscenely so - towards donald trump and against Hillary Clinton:

In other words, the mainstream media - the Beltway pundits that dominate the political discourse - flipped the real world. They focused more on Hillary's "scandals" - which turned out to be nothingburgers, inflated to inflame the voters against her - than on her policy positions to where I guarantee the average voter didn't even know what her policies were. They focused on trump's "policies" - which was BUILD A WALL, Start a TRADE WAR with China, and Shut Down NATO - while ignoring trump's failures, financial scandals, and sexual assaults.

In short: Hillary got all the bad press, trump got all the good press.

We're seeing it happen again, especially in the national press like the New York Times and Washington Post (not to mention the 24-hour cable punditry like Fox Not-News (obviously), CNN, and yes even liberal-leaning MSNBC). Most of that mainstream media focusing on narratives over Biden "needing to step aside for a younger more winnable Democrat" even as the early primary results have Biden body-slamming his opponents by 80-90 percent. Most of that same mainstream media ignoring donald trump's open calls to put immigrants into internment camps, to destroy NATO as a bulwark against Russia, to operate as a dictator on Day One "to punish" his enemies; even ignoring the recent reports of how trump's White House staff was pumping themselves full of drugs as a dangerous abuse of power.

It's that disconnect - especially at the Paper Of Record the New York Times - that is leaving our whole nation vulnerable to disinformation, misplaced outrage, and misled voters. It's the kind of thing enraging the likes of Lucian K. Truscott IV (a long-tenured reporter and pundit himself) over at Salon:

Two things — check that, three things — appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady. First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job. Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias. Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Let’s start right there. At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent. “You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today.” You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend. You’ll have to read other publications — for example, Salon or maybe the Guardian — if you want to learn how often Trump is losing his way mid-sentence at rallies and just mumbling incoherently.

The Times on Sunday, however, had this headline ready for your morning coffee: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective.” It’s another grab from the New York Times/Siena College poll they published on Saturday that is so outrageously flawed, a cottage industry has sprung up to pick apart its methodology and point out its glaring contradictions and straight-up bias.

A favorite of poll skeptics is its sampling bias. How did the New York Times come up with a polling sample that included 36 percent rural voters when the 2020 proportion of rural voters was 19 percent? Somehow, the poll’s sample of female voters was equally skewed. The poll found Trump winning the female vote by one percent, when Biden carried women in 2020 by 11 points. The Times wants you to ignore that in between, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices quarterbacked the Dobbs decision overturning women’s constitutional right to abortion, followed almost immediately by states banning abortion all over the country, many with no exceptions for rape or incest. The Times doesn’t say how it squares its poll numbers with the fact that women turned out in huge numbers to help win referendums confirming a right to abortion, including in such Republican strongholds as Kansas and Kentucky, and handed every special election to Democratic candidates in the bargain. They just want you to believe there’s been a 12-point swing toward Trump among women, with no evidence except, poof!  It happened!...

Why is the New York Times missing the red flags in its own polls? More important, why has the paper decided to give its own deeply biased poll results such heavy play? I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again?... None of the daily drumbeat of manufactured “news” added up to even a pinprick of a scandal, but as the Times did with Whitewater and the rest of the made-up Clinton scandals, the paper simply couldn’t resist filling its front page with negative stories about the Democratic candidate for president...

If I could answer from my spot on the sidelines, there are several overlapping reasons why the Times - and the Post, and CNN, and everybody else with a free pass to the green rooms of every talking head show out there - are making the same mistakes they made in 2016.

One of the most obvious reasons the mainstream media behaves this way is the "horse race mentality" that a political campaign brings to the public's attention. It's the simplest way to frame and cover an election - This Guy vs. That Guy, let's see who wins! - even at the expense of the practical issues. The media wants this to be a personality contest.

But part of the problem is how the media frames this personality contest with a mindset of "Both Sideism" - that both candidates AND the two major parties they represent have to be balanced in some way - to where they will enlarge or over-report any minor issue for one candidate/party - to the point of fabricating scandal where there is no scandal - in order to balance the open and major flaws of the opponent. We're seeing it now where the Beltway elites are whining over the "scandal" of Biden being "too old" (when he's only three years older, and shows signs of being more fit than trump) while papering over the reality that trump is facing up to 91 felony charges in four different court rooms.

This is, by the by, why the House Republicans are still so desperate to dig up dirt on Biden's family: Fresh red meat to feed to a media corps hungry for "Both Sides" scandal reporting.

A less obvious reason the punditry are acting this way is due to their own world views getting shaped during the Reagan Era of "Sunny Conservative" Born Again Americanism. Much like the punditry and journalism of the Sixties and Seventies shaped by those who grew up to the FDR New Deal experience, today's punditry and media leadership came of age in the Eighties and Nineties, which shapes their bias of today. I said this before: 

What we're getting is this ongoing fantasy, this wish fulfillment, among the Far Right pols and pundits desirous for The Return Of The Reagan Heir: the Prince That Was Promised. We're talking about a set of people pining for the days when it was 1985: when Reagan stomped the hell out of Mondale and his dirty hippie librul army of Electoral College no-shows...

Far too many pundits and reporters view modern Democrats as "out of touch" of the "mainstream" American thought, which the media thinks means "Rural" "White" and "Angry". This is the reason why the Times/Siena College polling skewed their sample population 36 percent Rural instead of making it 19 percent like the 2020 vote turnout confirmed. The national media EXPECTS this to be fact when instead its their own bias showing.

This is why the mainstream media keeps wishcasting - thank you, Tom Nichols - for The Next Reagan: this charming, wistful, flag-waving pie-loving patron for that Small-Town America where neighbors knew everybody well enough to leave folding chairs along the 4th of July parade route down Broadway Avenue the day before, because they trust each other enough that nobody will go stealing them.

The media elites kind of know that donald trump cannot be the Reagan figure, he doesn't come from that America - he and his will happily steal or vandalize those folding chairs, and then blame it on immigrants - but the pundits still can't wrap their heads around the possibility that Biden and the Democrats can represent that part of America alongside the 4th of July parade routes down MLK Boulevard in Los Angeles and Chicago and Tampa and San Antonio and Cleveland and every other major metro where most Americans actually reside.

So they chide the Democratic front-runners for not fulfilling their Reaganesque fantasy - even as Biden, as I've noted before, is as close a Reagan (Passive-Positive) figure the Democrats have to lead the nation - all the while promoting less-charismatic Republicans - stop making Rubio happen, he's not going to happen! - or worse providing cover for Republicans representing the racism, sexism, greed and violence of America's darker Id - at the expense of the American voters remaining misinformed and disillusioned.

I'm finishing this up just as the Super Tuesday voting is wrapping up. Both Biden and trump won enough states and delegates to effectively wrap up their respective nominations, but with noticeable differences. Biden - again - curb-stomped his primary opponent Dean Phillips to where in most states Phillips was in third place behind "Uncommitted" (which also tended to be in single digits). trump actually lost a state - Vermont - to opponent Nikki Haley; and while he dominated in several states in most others Haley had secured around 30 percent, which is a significant portion of party voters.

Biden is winning big as an incumbent candidate for the Democrats, while trump is struggling as the incumbent candidate for the Republicans.

And yet you'll never see the Beltway Media frame The Narrative of their horse race in that manner.

The pundits just can't see it that way.