According to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, the Democratic Party is far saner than the Republican Party. One reason for that, Chait suggested this past Sunday, is that Democrats benefit from powerful forces that help keep them rational -- forces that include CBS News and The Washington Post.
“The fact is that the Democratic Party is fundamentally accountable to the mainstream news media. And that media…try to follow rules of objectivity that the right-wing alternative media does not bother with,” argued Chait. “Democratic politicians need to please a news media that is open to contrary facts.”
Chait acknowledged that the MSM has “its liberal biases, but it also misses the other way -- see the [New York] Times’ disastrously wrong report, a week before the election, that the FBI saw no links between the Trump campaign and Russia and no intention by Russia to help Trump. One cannot imagine Fox News publishing an equivalently wrong story against the Republican Party’s interests -- its errors all run in the same direction.”
As Chait sees it, the mainstream media “serves as a guardrail” for Dems, while Fox News is part of a “media ecosystem” that “serves only as an accelerant” for “the pathologies of the Republican Party.” Another part of that ecosystem is a Florida-based radio host: “The left has no equivalent to a Rush Limbaugh in influence and sheer lunacy…There are figures just as crazy as Limbaugh on the left, but they are almost uniformly outside the Democratic Party coalition.”
The GOP’s central problem, indicated Chait, has become America’s central political problem (bolding added):
It is simply impossible to design any kind of a system that can withstand a stress test like a major party captured by a faction as radical as the conservative movement…
…Republicans are sealed off in a bubble of paranoia and rage, and Democrats are sealed off from that bubble. Democrats fear Republican government because it is dangerous and extreme. Republicans fear Democratic government because they are dangerous and extreme.
