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“The last week has been more brutal for Biden than any week of Trump’s presidency.”

[Note: this post was written, as with all the commentary referenced in the post, before the August 26 suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport.]

That's the assessment of Jonathan Chait on the media coverage Biden is getting. (The quotation is the subhead on Chait's post, "Why the Media Is Worse for Biden Than Trump," on New York magazine's homepage.)

Last night, Brian Williams, after playing a Fox News clip of Kevin McCarthy asserting that Biden is “siding with the Taliban” and then reading a Jonathan Allen quote suggesting that “bipartisan criticism” risks putting Democrats in jeopardy in 2022 as well the Biden agenda, asked James Carville about the possible political fallout of the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan. Carville responded:

“Well first of all, there’s no elegant way to lose a war. We lost this war 15 years ago. All Joe Biden’s doing is telling us what time it is. And the hysterical and stupid coverage of the mainstream press has just been awful. Just read New York magazine or Josh Marshal at Talking Points.”

I'm with Carville in recommending both NY mag and TPM as antidotes to the unbalanced pack journalism we're seeing, though many observers have been critical of what we're reading in the press and seeing on cable news channels on the Afghan withdrawal. Doug Muder provided an excellent wrap-up ("Afghanistan, Biden, and the Media") several days ago.

Chait draws attention to the familiar fact that the mainstream media is only half the story (and sometimes not the dominant half). Fox News Channel and the conservative media complex have an outsized influence. Byron York boasts of the startling reach of FNC. And that reach is not confined to partisan viewers, or to the cable channels competing for viewers; it affects news coverage across the mainstream media. Chait sums up:

The mainstream media certainly gave Trump harsh and even overtly hostile coverage. But the mainstream media only describes roughly half the media landscape. The other half of the media is a right-wing messaging apparatus that makes no effort to follow traditional journalistic norms. Republicans communicate to their base through a media that functionally operates as part of their party, while Democrats communicate to their base through a media that still exerts substantial independence. If you want to understand the strange difficulty that Joe Biden’s sane, competent administration has in yielding measurably higher approval than Trump’s insane, incompetent presidency, the asymmetrical relationship between the two parties and their respective media environments is the most important place to start.

Yeah. We're accustomed to regarding Fox News (and other propaganda organs of the GOP) as background noise that only Republican partisans tune into, but the landscape is harsh:

  • When Trump got negative coverage in the mainstream press, FNC and company continued to fawn over him. (It might not have been fair, but it generated a balance between competing interpretations.)
  • When Biden gets positive coverage from mainstream sources, FNC and the conservative media continue to pour on the hostility.
  • When Biden gets negative coverage from the mainstream press and from the conservative propaganda apparatus, there is only one story line: Biden is a disaster.

Look at the headline at the top of this post again. On one level, it's shocking isn't it? Yet, given the influence of Fox News Channel, king of hill of conservative media (and all the wannabes yipping at FNC's tail), it's hard to dispute its accuracy.

Kevin Drum, whose persistent commentary highlighting FNC's influence (increasing GOP votes in elections, shaping mainstream media news coverage, and -- of course -- stoking the rage of FNC viewers against Americans who don't share their political views) goes back many years, recently concluded: "It is Fox News that has torched the American political system over the past two decades . . . ." And the flames are burning as brightly as the wildfires in the west.