A November 14 Substack post by left-leaning political science professor and freelance journalist Yascha Mounk had pithy things observations on how the liberally biased press is actually hurting Democrats by keeping them blind to genuine political threats, in “Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy -- Journalists who turn themselves into political activists inadvertently undermine democratic institutions.”
He opened with a story of being sent home to change during his 2006 internship at the International Herald Tribune, an English-language newspaper based in Paris:
I had put on a T-shirt a friend had given me during the presidential campaign a few years earlier: a depiction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream bearing the inscription “Bush Again?” I doubt the T-shirt offended anyone at the office. In fact, I imagine that the great majority of staffers at the IHT shared the sentiment. But the leaders of the newsroom took very seriously their duty both to be neutral and to be seen to be neutral
(….)
This nicely sums up the bygone attitude of journalists. As a group, they have always skewed left, and perhaps always will. But they also had a strong conception of their role and the professional standards it entails: Their job was to be fair arbiters, reporting without fear or favor…..
If that period of journalists being "fair arbiters" ever did exist, it certainly passed in the age of Trump:
All of that went out of the window when Donald Trump first entered politics. Political scientists like myself were sounding the alarm that authoritarian populists may represent a genuine danger to democracy. Other commentators were going even further, claiming that Trump should be understood, simply, as a fascist….
Mounk took the angle that not only were journalists driving readers away, they were driving their supposed friends in the Democratic Party into an electoral ditch, thanks to "the aspiration of many journalists to save democracy" which, he argued, "has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets, but "deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions[.]"
He added that this "ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain."
How? For one, by sweeping President Biden’s obvious cognitive struggles under the rug.
As it happens, the reluctance to level with readers ultimately accomplished the opposite of what was intended. It allowed Biden to stay in the race long enough to make the entire Democratic establishment complicit in covering up the true state of his mental health. And it made it virtually impossible to stage an open primary to choose his successor.
Mounk described the bubble of (yes) “elite misinformation” journalists erected to shield Biden but which left Democrats driving blind, leaving "palpable" "irony" with journalists being "careful not to emphasize facts which might make it harder for Democrats to beat Trump."
He continued:
But at each step, this created a bubble of “elite misinformation” that made it impossible for Democrats to make the hard strategic choices they needed to win the election....
Mounk got in some well-deserved hits on the media’s hypocritical outrage over right-wing “misinformation":
If you were a faithful reader of The New York Times or a frequent listener of NPR, you were less likely than the average American citizen to believe that Biden was suffering from serious mental decline or that Harris was an unpopular politician with a steeply uphill path towards winning the presidential election.
