Clown World

 When you live in Clown World.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/why-the-media-is-worse-for-biden-than-trump.html

Over the last week, the media has hammered Joe Biden with relentlessly critical coverage of his pullout from Afghanistan, resulting in noticeable drops in his approval ratings. Put aside for a moment whether this reflects failures by Biden or biases by the media. One conclusion we can draw is that this sort of dynamic is a regular feature of Democratic presidencies, and — as the Trump administration showed — a near impossibility during Republican ones.

But wait, you’re thinking. Didn’t the media hound Donald Trump for four straight years at least as hard as it’s hounded Biden over the last week?

Well, sort of. 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.

On Biden’s best days, the conservative media was still giving him hell. In recent days, CNN and MSNBC looked a lot like Fox News, all hyping chaos in Afghanistan 24/7. That is the kind of comprehensive media hostility Trump never had to worry about.

And the flip side of the very different media environment facing Democrats is that it at least forces them to try to meet some minimal standard of competence and honesty. Their politicians sometimes lie, as politicians do, but if caught in a lie, it’s untenable for them to simply repeat the lie over and over.

The standard that mainstream news media applies to Democrats leaves plenty to complain about. (And I do.) But if we have learned anything from the previous four years, it’s that being held to a flawed standard ultimately works out better than not being held to any standard at all.