By Dave Andrusko
Like most of those unwilling to take the legacy media’s drivel as gospel, pro-lifers rightly complain of rampant media bias.
What’s truly interesting about Dan McLaughlin’s “Seven Theories of Press Complicity with the Harris Campaign” is not just its comprehensiveness, although it’s all of that and more. It’s to remind you (as if you needed to be reminded) that it didn’t start with pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris.
Sure, we’ve seen media bias before, but the past month has taken things to new levels. The press took Barack Obama’s personality cult and magnified it; with Harris and Tim Walz, they’ve invented one from whole cloth. The press let Joe Biden slide for years on taking few, scripted questions and ducking interviews; now they’re letting Harris get away with taking no questions at all (no interviews, no press conferences, no interactions with voters) and issuing statements through spokespeople disavowing her own prior record and positions with no explanation
And to top it all off, some Democrats, pretending to be scribes, are touting her silence as a shrewd political calculus — “as if it’s the job of the media to applaud rather than challenge candidates who try to manipulate them and avoid uncomfortable questions.”
So, what are the seven theories of press complicity?
1. Simple partisanship. Most young reporters are “woke” for which the old ideal of “objectivity” is both amusing and quaint. But why are the old geezers greasing the skids for Harris?
2. Identity politics. Many female reporters “are especially invested in the narrative of Harris as a stand-in for all women and a referendum on women as president.” But what if reporters have to treat Harris as a politician with a record to be evaluated? “The wagons get circled in order to preserve the simplicity of Harris-as-women, rather than the grubby reality of Harris the politician.”
3. Trump. He is a threat to all that is right and holy, and it would be a dereliction of duty if reporters don’t do everything in their power to stop this “threat to democracy.” Nothing else need be added.
4. Audience capture. “Put simply, if you work for CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times, all your incentives are to give your readers and viewers what they want — and conservative-leaning audiences have tuned those outlets out so much that there is nothing but negative feedback for coverage that does anything but help Democrats defeat Trump.”
5. Guilt trips. There are, shall we say, few occasions where the behavior of a Democrat is so beyond the pale that reporters must make a pass at criticism. But…
“Like an umpire trying to fix a bad call, whenever the national press as a whole moves against a Democrat, you can expect a snap-back effort to restore the natural order of things by going too far in the other direction.”
6. Source-greasing. Times are tight in an era of “proliferating outlets and declining revenues,” and “politicians have figured out that they hold a lot of leverage over reporters.” You write something critical and you lose access and scoops. “Harris herself, while refusing to talk on the record, has reportedly been chatting off the record with the people on her campaign plane — shaping coverage in her favor in exchange for an agreement not to tell voters what she’s been saying to them.” And finally
7. Respect for the game. There is a tendency to treat politics as a game, a “horse-race,” as an ongoing episode of The West Wing where “strategy” is everything. If you play the game well, there is lots of admiration from political reporters. And, speaking of coups:
By dumping their unpopular incumbent nominee midstream, a coup apparently masterminded by the aged former speaker of the House, and seamlessly substituting a new nominee and then unifying their party behind her and subduing the press into prostration, Democratic power brokers have indeed played the inside-the-Beltway game very well the past month. If your concept of political journalism is simply to cheer those who wield the knife well, that yields good coverage.
McLaughlin concludes, “But it’s not what a free press is for in a free and democratic republic.”
Amen to that.