There ain’t no liberal media

No need to work the refs; the prestige pressies have learned helplessness

You see shit like the header image here every day, right.

You hardly need a backgrounder, but: In their respective primaries Biden and Trump have both clinched their 2024 nominations. Biden has 2,107 delegates vs. 20 “uncommitted” protest delegates; none of the human beings who ran against him has won any delegates. Trump has 1,269 delegates and Nikki Haley has 96 (with DeSantis and Ramaswamy with six and three, respectively). Haley dropped out on March 6 and she was still getting votes on March 12 — including 21% of the GOP Washington state primary.

But you’re much more likely to see headlines telling you “Trump dominates” (NPR), and headlines like “’A clarion call’: Democratic donors sound the alarm to Biden about strength of ‘uncommitted’” (NBC) than you are to see headlines that portray the actual, relatively equivalent (by which I mean less flattering to Trump) situation.

We see it all the time. Because Biden is slow on the draw, the prestige press portrays him as a feeble old man who can’t keep it together, while his near-contemporary Trump, who yammers like an actual imbecile in his public appearances, is treated as hale and hearty. (And this is not to speak of Trump’s promises to rule as a dictator.)

You may attribute this imbalance to a bias among the prestige press toward the showy and theatrical — that Biden’s elderly behavior reads as “weak” because it is soft, whereas Trump’s ravings read as “strong” because they are dramatically loud and unmoored, and that’s what excites such journalists.

Maybe there’s a similar explanation for the New York Times pushing this point (“Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to Be Effective”) based on, as Lucian K. Truscott notes, “a polling sample that included 36 percent rural voters when the 2020 percentage of voters who were rural was 19 percent.” Maybe rural voters are hot now; I haven’t looked at the Style Section lately.=

Maybe there’s a mundane explanation as well for all the prestige press horserace stories that portray Trump-Biden II as if it were Eisenhower-Stevenson II rather than an existential crisis for democracy — like Axios’ “Top Trump advisers try to steer him off personal drama.” (A better title would be “Trump advisers tell credulous reporters they’re making him nice, despite all evidence to the contrary.”) Or the Times’ “Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted,” based largely on vibes and comments from a handful of people including “Max Dower, the founder of the clothing line Unfortunate Portrait,” who, I’m not kidding, “recently designed a $78 shirt that reflected his sense of feeling ‘uninspired’ about the election.”

Or how about this: Remember when I told you about Trump lie diffuser Kellyanne Conway’s campaign to soften the effect of Dobbs and Republican abortion bans on the 2024 vote — in part by “by talking more about protecting contraception and less about banning abortion,” which despite being a non-sequitur was treated seriously by several major outlets?  Conway’s at it again, this time portraying a 15-week abortion ban as a “compromise” — which is again good enough for several major outlets, including Politico (“Conway urges Republicans to flip the script on abortion”), and small wonder — Conway was peddling this bullshit at Politico’s “Health Care Summit.”

We could attribute these absurdities, and hundreds more like them, to any number of extrinsic causes rather than a prestige press hard-on for Trump Administration II. But as Humphrey Bogart said at the end of The Maltese Falcon as he was toting up the points against Mary Astor’s Brigid: Look at the number of them.

And whether the trend is influenced by, for example, the long-term effect of a decades-long concerted effort by conservatives to intimidate the press out of saying anything that might be interpreted by the most bad-faith observer as Liberal Bias — working the refs, as it’s called — that is of course a factor, and so what. I don’t care how these chucklefucks got the way they are. I don’t care whether it’s because they took bribes and are all “Hail Hydra” or because the top ranks of journalism are almost exclusively populated by grad school dummies who don’t know why people stand in picket lines when they could just ask their parents for a bump in allowance or what their major malfunction is.

I only care about the result, which is that they constantly go out of their way to normalize a candidate and a cause that are very clearly not just conservative for some nearly meaningless value of “conservative” but also opposed to the democratic values all political actors used to at least pretend to share. I wouldn’t even call it bias. I consider it madness.

You heard some people saying recently as the Supreme Court did Trump the latest (but not the last) in a series of favors that we “can’t count on the courts” to protect us. Well, whatever you may have thought (though if you’d been reading Eric Alterman you might have caught on by now), you can’t count on the prestige press either.