President Biden's Media Problem
The media establishment has not been good to this President, particularly on the subject of his age.
The media establishment has not been good to this President, particularly on the subject of his age. President Biden himself acknowledges the legitimacy of questions about his age in this upcoming election. Unfortunately, roughly 400 days before we go to the polls, media coverage has not reflected those lingering, valid questions in a manner responsible to the office. Instead, we get breathless above-the-fold insinuations about his age, as in the following:
The cumulative effect of the President acknowledging questions about his age as legitimate and the media’s obsession with casting those same questions in an alarmist, headline-grabbing manner has led to a noticeable degree of Biden’s poll stagnation. Should the polls be this close, particularly considering that the adversary is facing “91 criminal counts across four separate indictments”? Probably not; but here we are. To what precise degree the excessively negative media coverage surrounding his age has depressed the President’s numbers, I simply cannot divine. But I do believe it has had a dangerous cumulative effect, in addition to the underreporting of the country’s economic success, post-COVID.
And — make no mistake about it — this is going to be a close election. It was a close election in 2020, and all present polling suggests it will be once again. This is how divided we are. We don’t seem to have the will to turn the page and it doesn’t help that we have a repeat performance of 2020. As if all of that weren’t alarming enough, there are headwinds of “Biden Complacency,” summed up here nicely by Jeet Heer of The Nation:
The prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch is turning Democrats, not self-assured at the best of times, into even bigger nervous wrecks. Biden’s approval rating remains low, hovering in the vicinity of 40 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval, despite a recent White House push touting the achievements of “Bidenomics.” The public is stubbornly pessimistic about the economy—which puzzles Biden supporters who cite economic reports showing robust employment and declining inflation. These statistics fail to reflect how many Americans experience the economy, with Covid-produced disruptions persisting while the expanded welfare state that helped poor Americans cope during Covid is now being systematically dismantled.
A poll released last Thursday by CNN/SSRS showed Biden losing to a raft of Republican candidates: not just Trump (47 percent to Biden’s 46 percent) but also Nikki Haley (49 percent to 43 percent), Mike Pence (46 percent to 44 percent), Tim Scott (46 percent to 44 percent). In this poll, Biden can’t even measure up the widely despised and utterly ridiculous Chris Christie (who leads 44 percent to 42 percent).
To which the Progressive observer might ask with some exasperation: What is to be done?
In the last six months, editorial content — from reputable media sources — have pressed the narrative of Biden being somehow too lacking in “Chi” to be President. It is a narrative started by Trump, with his “sleepy Joe” moniker during the last campaign. Even Progressive and center-left media organizations have given prominent editorial real estate to questions regarding the President’s vitality and vigor. The President falling this summer at the Air Force Academy graduation. The verbal gaffes (that, incidentally, stem from a stutter that he has largely overcome). The fake-news sleep incident at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, reported on by CNN.
The President will be closer to 90 than 80 should he serves out the entirety of his second term. And gas prices, yes, are still a recurring problem, disproportionately affecting the lower middle class. And this week David Ignatius of the WashPo a prominent foreign policy media type who should know better, is calling for Biden to step aside.
What of “Bidenomics”? “Inflation has dropped for 11 straight months, from its peak of 9.1% in June of last year to 4.0% in May,” writes Alexandra Hutzler for ABC News. “Unemployment stands at 3.7%, which is a near 50-year low, and 13 million jobs have been added since Biden took office.” The economic data is “surreally good,” according to Paul Krugman, another prominent media hand. But Krugman, we cannot fail to relate, is a Nobel Prize winning economist and opinion writer for the New York Times. While I acknowledge his brilliance at seeing large economic trends, it is hard to imagine that Krugman really feels the pinch of buying eggs and bacon (if he even goes in for that much cholesterol) — or remembers how much cheaper such breakfast staples were before COVID. However the economy — as almost all indicators note — is certainly doing better.
“Why do so many give Biden a poor grade on the economy?” Tweeted Heather Long, economic columnist of the WashPost. “This chart (see above ) is a pretty good explanation: Inflation-adjusted median household income *fell* -$1,750 in 2022. Inflation hurt a lot. Things are improving in 2023, but the sting remains.” It does indeed.
Again, What is to be done? For one, the Biden campaign should stress the concreteness of Joe Biden’s experience. Sidney Blumenthal “de-abstractifies” the benefits of Biden’s steady leadership as President, despite the visible signs of decline, in the Guardian:
Biden’s judgment is not attributable to an abstract and amorphous category called “experience”, but rather particular concrete experiences, beyond bearing the weight of his unimaginable personal tragedies. His defeats and missteps, slights and belittlement, have accumulated on to the years of committee chairmanships, a lifetime in the Senate like no other president since Lyndon Johnson and the whole range of being vice-president involved in every major decision of the executive during the Obama administration.
In the Senate, Biden surrounded himself with the most talented staff. He was not that insecure. As president, at the head of a vast government, his cabinet is an array of highly effective people. There has not been a single major scandal among them after the most corrupt administration in American history. The paradox of Biden’s poll numbers among Democrats is that there is no complaint about how he runs the government.
Yesterday, I wrote about President Biden’s point-to-point navigation of the complex world of traditional power blocs. That takes vigor, knowledge experience and, quite frankly, wisdom. A smaller man could not have negotiated some of the furious recent diplomatic accomplishments of this administration — in Brazil, with our European allies, in ASEAN, as just a few examples. The administration, thankfully, has also begun to push back against the nattering nabobs of negativism in mainstream media coverage. Today, the White House issued an unusual letter to media leaders. It says, in part, ‘It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.’ It continues: “Impeachment is grave, rare, and historic. The Constitution requires ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.’ But House Republicans are publicly stating they have uncovered none of these things. “
Of course it doesn’t. The main purpose of this spurious and childish impeachment procedure — where Trump privately advised lawmakers — is to inflict maximum revenge upon the Democrats while simultaneously saving Kevin McCarthy’s ass. The more sewage Trump can toss against Biden, the better he will look by comparison, with his own monstrous legal problems. One of the reasons why he lost in 2022 was because, in comparison to Biden, Trump looked quite frankly indecent.
And not much has changed, except the 91 criminal counts across four separate indictments. But you would be hard-pressed to come to that conclusion if you read the mainstream media’s caustic depictions of the Biden campaign.
“In June 2021, perhaps for the last time, President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin met face to face. They talked for three hours, emerging to tell reporters that there had been no breakthroughs; Biden told reporters that he’d handed Putin a list of 16 examples of critical U.S. infrastructure, warning him of consequences if any came under cyberattack. According to ‘The Last Politician,’ the Biden-in-power book that Franklin Foer published last week, the president spoke more ominously than he’d let the public know. ‘Put yourself in my shoes,’ Biden told Putin. ‘I mean, with the attacks on our infrastructure. Imagine if something happened to your oil infrastructure…’ Biden let ‘the thought hang in the air,’ and reading it now, it hangs even heavier.” (David Weigel/semafor)
“Over the span of her impressive career, (Christiane Amanpour) has traveled to dozens of countries, interviewed legions of politicians, and shined a spotlight on more injustices than one would probably care to know exist in this world. But of all the assignments, there is one in particular that snapped to mind when I asked her which has left the most profound impact on her: Bosnia. ‘It was genocide,’ Amanpour bluntly recalled, adding that covering the humanitarian crisis that unfolded in the country led her to adopt her trademark ‘be truthful, but not neutral’ motto on journalism.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“Marty Peretz is a money guy. Sure, he lectured at Harvard and blogged for The New Republic, but the main reason we know his name is how he spent his money—most visibly, bankrolling TNR for more than thirty years, during which the magazine’s Third Way liberalism and hawkish foreign policy became ascendant in the Democratic Party. There are lots of money guys out there, but most of them prefer not to be seen, heard, or read. Peretz is an exception, and now he has a memoir, The Controversialist, that brazenly insists on his own centrality to recent history. Peretz has largely avoided the spotlight since 2010, when a group of students and affiliates of Harvard ambushed him on camera and confronted him with placards bearing incendiary racist quotes about Black Americans, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims from his TNR blog. Despite pressure from activists and prominent journalists like the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, Harvard still accepted a $700,000 endowed fellowship in Peretz’s name.” (David Klion/The Baffler)
Mitt Romney stepping down from the US Senate. (The Guardian)
What the U.S. Can Learn From China About Regulating AI (Matt Sheehan/FP)