The Democrats’ Worst Frenemy: The Media?

Here’s a heterodox thought: the slanted news media is unwittingly the Democrats’ worst frenemy.

The line of reasoning to arrive at this proposition begins thus: Last month Prof. Lauren Wright of Princeton University attracted notice for a provocative article in The Atlantic on “How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students.” Wright’s thesis was simple: because conservative students are constantly challenged at our overwhelmingly left-leaning campuses, they work harder to learn how to defend their views, usually become better informed about a full spectrum of perspectives on issues, and develop a thicker skin.

By contrast, Wright observes, liberal students tend to be complacent, intellectually lazy, and uninformed about other points of view, precisely because liberal campuses don’t challenge liberal students to think critically about their own opinions. Wright recounts in her article how much better informed and versatile conservative Princeton students are compared to liberal Princeton students. This paradoxical fact about how conservative students thrive on left-leaning campuses is well-known to conservatives, though hardly anyone else apparently.

But it likely applies to the mainstream news media as well. After all, elite media outlets like the New York Times are dominated by liberal graduates of liberal ivy league colleges. Journalists bring the ideological laziness and narrowness of the campus bubble to newsrooms, producing a highly conformist narrative that distorts reality.

That mainstream media “reporting” favors Democrats and liberal points of view is beyond dispute by this point. What no one is asking is whether this pro-Democrat bias actually hurts Democrats and liberal causes, in the same way that one-sided curricula in colleges hurts the education of liberal students.

The exit of Joe Biden from the presidential race following the vivid and undeniable display of his age-related disability in the June 27 debate ought to be an example taught in journalism schools in the decades to come, but surely won’t be. Prior to the June 27 debate, any mainstream media outlet that dared to raise questions about Biden’s age and obvious mental decline were shouted down by other “respectable” mainstream media.

When the Wall Street Journal published a deeply-reported story in early June about how Biden was mentally “slipping,” the paper was greeted with ferocious denunciation by other media.

The mainstream media allowed itself to be used as a transmission belt for White House talking points that videos of Biden’s faltering physical and mental capacities were “cheap fakes.” Reporting in conservative media were subjected to endless “fact checks” that all found claims of Biden’s disability were false or “misleading.” Both the New York Times and Washington Post used “misleading” in headlines debunking the mounting visual evidence.

Hiding Biden’s decline is not the only example of the lockstep media enforcement of the Democratic Party line. Back in 2022 NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns was roundly attacked for reporting that Pennsylvania Senate Candidate John Fetterman, whose health status following a severe stroke was being ignored by the media, had trouble carrying on a basic conversation.

As if borrowing from the Ring Lardner novel The Young Immigrunts, the media as one said to Burns: “Shut up, they explained.”

The point is: the extended White House coverup of Biden’s deterioration, evident as early as 2021 if not sooner, was only possible because a compliant liberal media went along with the coverup. Leading Democrats on Capitol Hill were aware of Biden’s problem, but couldn’t say very much so long as the media covered for Biden.

How has this worked out for Democrats? Once Biden’s deterioration became too obvious to ignore any longer after the June 27 debate, the media turned on him instantly. If the media had done its job properly and reported on Biden’s slippage a year ago, the party might have been able to convince Biden to stand down, or encouraged a serious challenge from several prominent Democratic office holders, enabling Democrats to have a regular nomination process to pick a strong candidate with time to develop a coherent campaign.

Instead, Democrats are now in crisis mode, likely having to settle for Kamala Harris as their candidate, even though she never won a single primary vote in the 2020 election cycle and has even lower approval ratings that Biden.

That is, she had lower approval ratings than Biden, until the media reverted to form and decided to give maximum effort to boost Harris. The media is performing another massive coverup of Harris’s far-left record, air brushing her record and credulously passing along her new positions, such as that she was never the “border czar.”

Is the media now repeating the same mistake with Kamala Harris that it made with Biden? The media is doing Harris and Democrats no favors by treating her with kid gloves and glowing coverage. (The Los Angeles Timesis typical, running a story on “Kamala Harris is a cook — and she knows her L.A. restaurants. Will it help her win?” Think of it as a puff pastry piece perhaps.)

Hence Harris is enjoying a nice “honeymoon” with voters, suddenly drawing even with Trump in the polls on a wave of sycophantic media. But what will happen once the Trump campaign begins running ads educating voters about Harris’s past radical positions, such as banning fracking, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, defunding the police, bailing out rioters, and nationalized medicine?

This election might play out as a re-run of 1988, when the relatively unknown Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis tried to airbrush his liberal record. He led George H.W. Bush by 17 points at this point in 1988, only to lose by 8 points in November after the public learned of his record.

Democrats ought to ask themselves whether having a too-friendly media is worse than having Republican enemies. It shields Democrats from true public opinion, and leaves them vulnerable to effective Republican attacks. And the mainstream media ought to ask itself if it serves their own ideological interests, let alone preserves their credibility, when they cease having an adversarial disposition to whoever is in power, and reveal themselves to be Democratic Party operatives with bylines.

Democracy dies in darkness, the Washington Post lectures us. But media credibility dies in partisanship.