Enemy of the People

One of the new narratives spinning around the Biden campaign, and among Biden supporters after his disastrous debate last Thursday, is that the press is in the bag for Trump. They want Trump to win, the thinking goes, because he’s good for ratings. Or because they hate that Biden hasn’t given them as much access as they would like. Or, perhaps, because they’re being controlled by their corporate overlords eyeing future tax cuts.

This new narrative mirrors the gripes of the Trump campaign and Trump supporters who think the press is out to get Trump because he called them “the enemy of the people,” or because he doesn’t play by their rules, or maybe they hate that he’s so manly or some such nonsense.

I don’t know.

But here’s where I feel fairly confident: if you’re blaming the press for your candidate’s shortcomings, you’re losing. The idea that “the press” is some cohesive body taking their marching orders from… somebody, I don’t even know who… is foolish. The medias’ motivations and ideologies are as disparate as the population in general, although I agree that the press probably does tend to lean more left than American writ large. A left-leaning press, however, is not the same as a propagandizing press in thrall to the government, or to any political party.

In a capitalist country with our First Amendment, the press is empowered to cover power in whatever way they see fit. Some certainly do propagandize on behalf of one party or another, some keep it to “just the facts, ma’am” reportage, others split the difference. If one looks, one can find news representing every color of the political spectrum. Even the KKK has a newspaper, The Crusader. You might remember them for endorsing Donald Trump in 2016.

Even the so-called “mainstream media” does not march in lockstep. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News all cater to their individual audiences, and every American knows who those audiences are. The few remaining national newspapers trend fairly centrist (I know, I know, you’re going to yell at me about the ludicrous op-eds the New York Times has been running for the last few years, although I would argue that the NYT absolutely should be publishing opinion pieces from all over the place), with the Wall St. Journal a bit more conservative than, say, the Washington Post, but not by very much.

So where does this idea of a “media narrative” come from? In my (as usual, speculative) opinion, it arises not from a desire to tell a story that comports to some sort of propagandistic agenda, but from the desire to tell stories people want to consume. That’s why we see stories parroted from network to newspaper to website; not because whatever story is “more important” than others, but because their audiences want those stories. In other words, the audiences shape the narrative as much as, or more than, the media themselves. The reason you see so little coverage in American media about, say, the latest news from the Azores, is because Americans don’t care. Most Americans, myself included, don’t even know where the Azores are. In the middle of some ocean somewhere, I think?

Why did that missing Malaysian airliner from a few years ago dominate the news for days at a time, even though there was rarely any new information about it? Do you remember the endless aviation experts, safety experts, and wormhole conspiracists who found their way in front of various news cameras to opine on the plane’s whereabouts? Why did our media spend so much time on it? Because it was a good mystery, and as Daniel Craig has learned of late, people love a good mystery, particularly one with an exotic accent.

So when Joe Biden shits the bed during a debate, that’s going to be the story, a story compounded when he fails to successfully allay the concerns he himself raised from that performance. The reason they didn’t cover Trump’s lies and nonsense with the same intensity is because that story has already been well-covered for the last eight years. His mendaciousness is already baked into that poisonous pie; if he’d been the one to have the same surprising performance that Biden had, they would have chased that story, instead.

The reason Trump has received so much coverage over the last eight years is for exactly the same reason: his insanity, incompetence, and malevolence were a huge story. They remain a huge story, of course, but there’s nothing new about it. Consumers want “new.” That’s why it’s called “the news.”

People were so quick to jump on Jake Tapper and Dana Bash for not fact-checking (despite that being agreed to by both candidates) or for the lighting being bad, or the sound not being good when Stephanopolous interviewed Biden yesterday. C’mon.

The fault for Joe Biden’s horrific debate performance lies entirely with Joe Biden, as he himself has said. Covering the story is the correct and responsible thing to do. Covering members of his own party calling on him to step down is the correct and responsible thing to do. Yes, comparing the two candidates is also the correct and responsible thing to do, but the only significant story to emerge from that debate was Biden. Nothing else particularly jumps out, other than Trump, again, refusing to say he would accept the election results. But again, we knew that.

The press gets a lot of things wrong, no doubt. The most egregious example in my lifetime was their mostly uncritical acceptance of George W. Bush’s false pretense for launching a war against a country that did not attack us. I would argue the Hillary Clinton email “scandal” was another example of press stupidity and gullibility, not because they were attempting to shape a narrative. Rather, I think they latched onto that story in a blundering attempt to be “even-handed” towards the two candidates. Trump was so full of bombast, lies, and insults that they had to find something to make it appear as if they were not simply cheerleading for Clinton.

Yes, our press has problems because it’s composed of fallible people attempting to do jobs which must always balance speed with certainty, an incompatible combination if ever there was one. Sometimes they get things wrong. But I firmly reject the idea that most of our traditional press is attempting to throw the election one way or the other. Mostly, I think they’re just trying to get as many eyeballs as they can in a competitive media landscape that rewards salaciousness. But who is it that wants their news presented to them in this way?

It’s us.