Democrats Fell Prey To The Same Toxic Dynamics That Destroyed Mainstream News
Instead of fighting smears, they appeased the smear merchants.
Bari Weiss has reportedly buttonholed her wary staff at 60 Minutes, and presumably elsewhere within CBS News, to ask them why they think the public views their output as biased.
I don’t want to dwell on Bari Weiss, on whether she’s powered by naïveté, cynicism, or both. But there happens to be an easy answer to this question, whether the person asking is a dupe or a liar, whether they work for CBS or any other news company. The answer is: our critics told lies and we chose to appease them.
To the extent the public perceives mainstream news outlets as politically biased for the left, it’s in large part because the institutional right has waged a decades-long campaign to smear journalists, so that GOP voters and low-information voters would have undue suspicion of, or simply disbelieve, unflattering news reports about Republicans.
Corporate media has many real problems. The one that bears most resemblance to right-wing smears is that the class of professional journalists isn’t culturally or socioeconomically representative of America, and this creates some blindspots. But the effect here is minor, and it’s particularly minor as it pertains to political news. Most of what you’ll read in the New York Times or watch on 60 Minutes will be accurate as to facts and mindful of differences in subjective interpretation. Inaccuracies overwhelmingly arise by accident, and journalism errors aren’t systematically biased against Republicans1. The profession takes these things seriously, and has established safeguards against disinformation and misinformation and sources of unintentional mistakes.
The right-wing campaign to smear this profession is led by people who know they are lying. Many of them work closely with reporters, and understand journalism processes well. Several have cycled in and out of mainstream newsrooms, as when Benny Johnson worked for BuzzFeed and Eliana Johnson worked for Politico. They know professional outlets operate in no way like the propaganda shops they eventually returned to, but they deceive their audiences about the reliability of the news media anyhow.
This, to me, is the cardinal fact real newsroom leaders2 need to reckon with if they want to rebuild public trust in their industry. The smear campaign against journalism is a scandal in its own right, and an industry with pride or even just a sense of self-preservation should want the world to know more about it.
But this is not how most mainstream news institutions have grappled with the long erosion of trust in their industry. They have instead yielded to the pressure campaign in ways that have made their products worse. False balance has become a professional habit at political desks. Basic realities that are well understood by people who work in and around American politics—which party is more prone to lying, which party is more corrupt—get lost or muddled in news coverage. Many outlets have adopted policies that serve effectively as affirmative action for Republican apparatchiks. Here’s CNN’s Abby Phillip noting that Scott Jennings, the Republican panelist who has a standing invitation to her roundtable, is a liar—indeed, in this instance, he’s lied specifically about the mainstream news outlet that employs them both and pays him handsomely.
Appeasement doesn’t just make the product worse, it’s killing what’s left of the mainstream news businesses. Right-wing audiences aren’t trying to get to yes with the mainstream media, which makes all the cowardice and capitulation worse than for naught. It drives away consumers who respect and understand the importance of real journalism. CNN’s viewership is at historic lows. The readership of the Washington Post is “vanishing.” It’s unclear whether leaders at either outlet understand why.
This is a story about the self-destruction of legacy news media. It’s also a parable about the Democratic Party in the Trump era.
ARC DE CAPITULATION
Democratic Party approval is at historic lows as well. Nearly all Republicans have been trained by other Republicans to hate Democrats. Democrats have responded largely through appeasement. The result is that about half of all Democrats no longer believe their party will protect them from Republicans.
Perception of the Democrats is thus shaped by the same forces that destroyed the credibility of mainstream news.