Wired For The GOP

 Over the years, Josh Marshall has argued that the DC Press Corps is "wired for the GOP." He doesn't mean that individual reporters lean towards Republicans. What he means - if I recall his argument correctly - is that there is a sort of horse-race, inside-baseball tilt to the way that they cover politics. This leads to focusing on the tactics of a electoral competition, rather than the impact that one side's policies may have.

Another way this shows up, obviously, is in the bothsides framing that preserves neutrality in voice. However, bothsidesing things is not neutral. By elevating certain stories over other stories, the media takes a side without "taking a side." The best example remains the stories in October of 2016 about Hillary Clinton's email practices, while dropping the story of Trump bragging about sexual assault after a few news cycles.

The other example is the process of "nut picking." There are some crazy opinions out there, on the left and the right. In order to flip the Michigan Senate seat, Republicans are trying to draw a straight line between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and the podcaster Hasan Piker. Piker has some legitimately obnoxious positions and statements, some of which fall into the "shock jock" category, some of which are the noxious rhetoric of the Very Online Left. El-Sayed has tried to distance himself from those positions, but I think he likely hasn't been forceful enough to completely sever himself from Piker, which is why he seems to be running behind the national climate.

On the other side, we have - well - the President of the United States saying legitimately insane things that would somehow be more damaging if they came from someone who wasn't the President of the United States - especially if it came from someone aligned with the Democrats. Even you want an apples to apples comparison, there's Elon Musk. Musk is an open White Supremacist and eugenicist. He has some frankly insane positions that are passed off as genius. He is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the election, because he's landed so firmly in Trumpistan that a Democratic government will feel compelled to clip his wings - wings that are feathered with US tax dollars.

In trying to figure out why Trump won election after January 6th, Paul Campos lists three possibilities. The first is that people believe Trump when he says the 2020 elections was rigged. These are, of course, MAGA voters. I don't think that holds water as a portrait of the electorate that actually swung the 2020 race.

The second is that they knew he was lying but didn't care; the third is that they didn't even know he made these lies. Look, I think there are a lot more people in that third category than there should be. Maybe a better way to think of them is that they didn't understand WHY those lies about the 2020 election were so profoundly important. If so, that is the shared fault of the media, civic education and basic informational literacy. 

To me, the real problem is likely the second group. These are people who think that "all politicians lie" and "all politicians are corrupt." If you begin from this basic position, then Trump is "just like the rest of them" - even if you admit that maybe, just maybe he's MORE of a liar and MORE corrupt than most - it's really just a difference in how much lying and graft he does. But since all politicians lie and steal, then why not Trump?

This, to me, is the real failure of our media institutions. In an effort to bothsides political disputes, they show someone like Bob Menendez or Graham Platner and make them the equivalent of Trump, without noting that Democrats abandoned both of the former and Republicans have created a cult of personality around the latter.