The Democrats’ worst ‘frenemy’

Here’s a heterodox thought: The slanted news media is unwittingly the Democrats’ worst “frenemy.”

The line of reasoning to arrive at this proposition begins thus: Last month, professor Lauren Wright of Princeton University attracted notice for a provocative article in the Atlantic on “How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students.” Wright’s thesis was simple: Because conservative students are constantly challenged at our overwhelmingly left-leaning campuses, they work harder to learn how to defend their views, usually become better informed about a full spectrum of perspectives on issues, and develop a thicker skin.

Democrats should ask themselves whether having a too-friendly media is worse than having Republican enemies.

By contrast, Wright observed, liberal students tend to be complacent, intellectually lazy, and uninformed about other points of view, precisely because liberal campuses don’t challenge liberal students to think critically about their own opinions. Wright recounted in her article how much better informed and versatile conservative Princeton students are compared to liberal Princeton students. This paradoxical fact about how conservative students thrive on left-leaning campuses is well-known to conservatives, though hardly anyone else apparently.

The analysis likely applies to the mainstream news media as well. After all, elite media outlets like the New York Timesare dominated by liberal graduates of liberal Ivy League colleges. Journalists bring the ideological laziness and narrowness of the campus bubble to newsrooms, producing a highly conformist narrative that distorts reality.

That corporate media “reporting” favors Democrats and liberal points of view is beyond dispute by now. What no one is asking is whether this bias actually hurts Democrats and liberal causes, in the same way that one-sided curricula in colleges hurts the educations of liberal students.

Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential race following the vivid and undeniable display of his age-related disability in the June 27 debate should be an example taught in journalism schools in the decades to come, but it surely won’t be. Prior to the Atlanta debate, any mainstream media outlet that dared to raise questions about Biden’s age and obvious mental decline was shouted down by other “respectable” mainstream media.

When the Wall Street Journal published a deeply reported story in early June about how Biden was mentally “slipping,” the paper was greeted with ferocious denunciation by other media.

The corporate media allowed itself to be used as a transmission belt for White House talking points that videos of Biden’s faltering physical and mental capacities were “cheap fakes.” Reporting in conservative media was subjected to endless “fact checks” that all found claims of Biden’s disability were false or “misleading.” Both the New York Times and Washington Post used “misleading” in headlines debunking the mounting visual evidence.

Hiding Biden’s decline is not the only example of the lockstep media enforcement of the Democratic Party line. Back in 2022, NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns was roundly attacked for reporting that Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman, whose health status following a severe stroke was being ignored by the media, had trouble carrying on a basic conversation.

As if borrowing from the Ring Lardner novel “The Young Immigrunts,” the media as one said to Burns: “Shut up, they explained.”

The point is: The extended White House cover-up of Biden’s deterioration, evident as early as 2021 if not sooner, was only possible because a compliant liberal media went along with the cover-up. Leading Democrats on Capitol Hill were aware of Biden’s problem but couldn’t say very much so long as the media covered for him.

What will happen once the Trump campaign begins running ads educating voters about Harris’ past radical positions?

How has this worked out for Democrats? Once Biden’s deterioration became too obvious to ignore any longer after the June 27 debate, the media turned on him instantly. If the media had done its job properly and reported on Biden’s slippage a year ago, the party might have been able to convince Biden to stand down or encouraged a serious challenge from several prominent Democratic office holders, enabling Democrats to have a regular nomination process to pick a strong candidate with time to develop a coherent campaign.

Instead, Democrats are now in crisis mode, likely having to settle for Kamala Harris as their candidate, even though she never won a single primary vote in the 2020 election cycle and has even lower approval ratings than Biden.

Rather, she had lower approval ratings than Biden until the media reverted to form and decided to give maximum effort to boost Harris. The media is performing another massive cover-up of Harris’ far-left record, airbrushing her record and credulously passing along her new positions, such as that she was never the “border czar.”

Is the media now repeating the same mistake with Kamala Harris that it made with Biden? The media is doing Harris and Democrats no favors by treating her with kid gloves and glowing coverage. (The Los Angeles Timesis typical, running a story on “Kamala Harris is a cook — and she knows her L.A. restaurants. Will it help her win?” Think of it as a puff pastry piece perhaps.)

Hence Harris is enjoying a nice “honeymoon” with voters, suddenly drawing even with Trump in the polls on a wave of sycophantic media. But what will happen once the Trump campaign begins running ads educating voters about Harris’ past radical positions, such as banning fracking, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, defunding the police, bailing out rioters, and nationalized medicine?

This election might play out as a rerun of 1988, when the relatively unknown Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis tried to airbrush his liberal record. He led George H.W. Bush by 17 points at this point in 1988, only to lose by eight points in November after the public learned of his record.

Democrats should ask themselves whether having a too-friendly media is worse than having Republican enemies. It shields Democrats from true public opinion and leaves them vulnerable to effective Republican attacks. And the corporate legacy media might ask itself if it serves its own ideological interests, let alone preserves its credibility, when it ceases having an adversarial disposition toward whoever is in power and reveals itself to be a Democratic Party operative with bylines.

Democracy dies in darkness, the Washington Post lectures us. But media credibility dies in partisanship.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at PowerLine.