Washington Post writer Perry Bacon Jr. on Monday blamed negative coverage of President Joe Biden from the establishment media for his “political plunge.”
Instead of indicting Biden’s policies that have fueled 40-year-high inflation, record high gas prices, the deadly Afghan withdrawal, and the invasion on the southern border, Bacon Jr. penned a whole article about the media’s liability for Biden’s tanking poll numbers.
Biden’s approval number is down to 30 percent, according to Civiqs. Only “26 percent of Democratic voters said the party should renominate him in 2024,” the New York Times found last week.
“The mainstream media has played a huge, underappreciated role in President Biden’s declining support over the past year,” the article whined about “media hysteria” that has “showed a marked increase in negativity in media coverage of Biden.”
“[I]n my view, media coverage is a big factor in those warped polling results,” Bacon Jr. continued. “Yes, I am calling for the media to cover Biden more positively… Ideally, on every issue, the media would compare the Republican and Democratic solutions. You can see how this model might help Biden.”
Bacon Jr. noted the negative coverage of Biden started after the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021 and has not improved since. “Journalists and outlets tore into the president,” he complained about its coverage of the deadly withdrawal. “As The Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in December, data analysis showed a marked increase in negativity in media coverage of Biden that started last August.”
The article credited the media’s coverage of the deadly withdrawal as being a catalyst for more negative coverage of the president, including dubious narratives of Democrat infighting, soaring inflation, and vast amounts of coronavirus deaths under Biden’s watch:
After the withdrawal, the media lumped other events into its “Biden is struggling” narrative: infighting among Democrats over the party’s agenda, Democrats’ weak performances in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, rising inflation, and the surge of the delta and omicron variants. Biden’s role in these issues was often exaggerated.
“It’s too early to say whether Biden is a great or even good president,” Bacon Jr. claimed. “But most Americans aren’t getting a fair look at that question. Instead of telling us whether Biden is effective, the media has focused on showing that it is not too biased toward Democrats.”
The op-ed comes as Gallup polling shows only 16 percent have “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and 11 percent in news on television. Both mediums have lost five points of confidence in one year since Biden assumed office.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter and Gettr @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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