Blaming the media is what got Democrats into this mess

Reality comes for everyone — and now it's come for Joe BIden.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

This quote in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article — later widely attributed to former Bush Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove — is one of the reasons I used to confidently assume I was on the side of the Good Guys. Sure, the world is unpredictable, stochastic — hence the need for a probabilistic approach to assessing political and human affairs. But liberals, progressives, Democrats — whatever you wanted to call us — at least we were trying to get the right answer rather than succumb to the sort of postmodern relativism that Rove engaged in. We stood for Facts, Data, Empiricism: reality was on our side.

The years between roughly 2004 and 2020 could hardly have been more validating for this hypothesis. Rove’s Iraq War proved to be a disaster, and Barack Obama was elected in a landslide in 2008 in response — and then again in 2012, culminating in Rove’s meltdown on Fox News on election night. And although Donald Trump was nominated by the Republican Party and elected in 2016 — the clearest sign yet of the modern American conservative movement’s disconnection from reality — he got his comeuppance in 2020, when Joe Biden defeated him and Trump became the first incumbent to lose re-election since Bush Sr. in 1992.

But here’s the new reality: Trump is probably going to become president again. Because I still do believe in empiricism and probabilistic thinking, I want to be clear that this is by no means certain. In our model, Trump’s chances are “just” 70 percent — and the model makes two assumptions that may not map well to the real world. One is that it offers what is technically a conditional prediction — an assessment of the odds if Biden remains the Democratic nominee (and Trump remains the Republican one). That is a tenuous proposition: at betting markets, Biden is considered more likely than not to exit the race, and I believe those markets probably underestimate the chance that Biden will drop out.

But also — and less favorably for Democrats — the model makes a lot of implicit assumptions about Biden’s fitness for running a campaign that probably do not apply in this instance. There’s no parameter in the model for “guy who wants to be president until he’s 86 but could barely form complete sentences.” Instead, Biden’s condition at the debate, and in some other recent public appearances, would be highly worrying if you encountered it in an aging grandparent. At the very least, you’d encourage them to undergo neurological testing, something Biden — like a lot of stubborn people at his age — has refused to do. It’s time to confront reality: wishing you could have the old Biden back won’t be any more effective than wishing you were 17 years old again.

The other harsh reality is this: the sort of epistemic closure that Rove was engaged in is no longer just a Republican phenomenon, if it ever was in the first place. Instead, it seems to be an intrinsic feature of our modern, highly partisan political and media environment. It is not entirely a “both sides” thing — remember, we empiricists believe reality is complicated, and a problem can be worse among Republicans but still bad among Democrats. That Democrats are much more serious about replacing Biden now than Republicans were for Trump in 2016 (or 2020 or 2024) is evidence for the difference between the parties, for instance. But epistemic closure is clearly an infliction that can affect both parties, and the Democratic immune system against it is weakening.

The dogmatic media critic that caught the car

Democrats retain much higher trust in the media than Republicans or independents — one reason the idea that Biden will benefit from a base-fueled backlash to the media’s increasingly skeptical treatment of the president is probably wrong. But there is an increasing legion of progressive writers and critics who attack the media from the left, an attitude that has even made its way into the White House (see, for instance, Biden’s ongoing war with the New York Times).

As someone who was an early proponent of the theory that Biden’s age was in fact a huge liability for him, I have complicated feelings about how the media has covered the story both before and after the debate. On the one hand, the coverage before was clearly inadequate — and it centered too much on the electoral implications and not the even more fundamental question of Biden’s fitness for office. On the other hand, the coverage wasn’t zero by any means: the Wall Street Journal, in particular, had taken the issue seriously, and Biden’s age and mental acuity was the subject of several weeks of sustained coverage following Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s finding in February that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who had “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

But the partisan media critics I cited before succeeded in keeping coverage to a simmer — the pot never quite boiled over. Journalists are human beings, and although they won’t want to admit it, most of them actually do read the mean Twitter messages you write about them. And, although they won’t admit to this either, most who work for high-prestige media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post are left-of-center. They aren’t necessarily partisan Democrats, but vanishingly few are Republicans or would like to see Trump elected again. (Nor would I, for that matter.)

There are some countervailing biases: publishers and media moguls are often centrists or conservatives, or at least unrepentant capitalists. But having worked for some of the biggest mainstream media outlets in the country — including the New York Times (where I still occasionally freelance) and ABC News — my experience is that staff attitudes usually prevail over management. At news organizations of a certain size, there are too many things happening at once — dozens of stories being published every day under intense deadline pressure — for central planning to be entirely effective.

In their critiques of coverage of Biden’s age, then, progressive media scolds are like the dog who caught the car. They succeeded in getting the media to frame the issue gingerly — for every story that engaged forthrightly, there were two that dismissed it as “misinformation”, sometimes even inventing whole new categories like “cheap fakes” to describe what were simply lightly edited but unflattering video clips of Biden.

But having caught the car, the critics aren’t sure what to do with it. Because the car was a lemon. In hunting down bad vibes, the critics didn’t change the underlying reality — they only made the media seem out of touch. “Vibes theory”, the postmodernist strain that began with Rove but has now has a through-line to progressive media critics, fails when it comes to things the public can see with its own eyes, like Biden’s obviously deteriorating condition or the fact that prices are much higher than they were when Biden took office. Instead, the Democratic Party now finds itself in a state of crisis.

Let me be careful here, because many liberals are in touch with reality: there is an impressively wide array of pundits, analysts and public intellectuals who share my concerns about Biden. In fact, I’ve found myself nodding along in agreement on this issue with people I never agree with about anything. Biden realists range from the far left to the center-right, and from people who were once big Biden fans to others who very much weren’t.

But there are still holdouts — and worrisomely for people who would like to see a different candidate nominated, they are more common in the vicinity of the White House. Senior staffers, and Biden himself, have come to distrust the polls and other attempts to objectively measure public opinion. The reality can be boiled down to these two numbers: 37 (percent), Biden’s approval rating, and 86, the age he’d be at the end of his second term. But the human mind is an incredibly effective reality-distortion device. It can work its way even around cold, hard facts by cherry-picking polls or lashing out at critics or engaging in all manner of conspiracy theories.

12 reasons why this is the biggest story in the world

Meanwhile, there are some critics who still wonder what the big fuss is all about:

I’m sorry, but if you can’t see why this is a huge story, I have to question what we in the business call your “news judgment”.

Commercial news outlets like the New York Times face conflicting pressures on which stories they pursue — because although they might claim to cover “all the news that’s fit to print”, there are limitations on time and space. On the one hand, news organizations want to cover stories they deem to be objectively important: those that affect a large number of people or which could shape the future course of world events. They see these as important to their mission and good for their brands — and less cynically, journalism tends to attract smart, idealistic people who endure perpetually chaotic career prospects because they think they’re doing something socially redeeming.

On the other hand, these outlets want to run stories that are compelling: that will bring them clicks, subscriptions and advertising revenues. So in places like the Times, there’s typically a mix of “eat your spinach” stories that are important but not compelling to a wider audience (say, reports of a war or famine in a far-flung country that most readers have never heard of) — as well as stories that are compelling but not important (say, the Taylor Swift beat or how best to grill a hot dog¹).

The Biden story is a rarity: it’s a walkoff grand slam in both departments. Consider, first, just how important it is:

1. Most important of all, there’s the question of whether the president is properly able to carry out his duties. According to leaks from his own staff, Biden is only “reliably engaged” for approximately 6 hours per day. Furthermore, the situation is reportedly rapidly deteriorating — so that Biden was fairly productive in his first two years in office doesn’t necessarily speak to his condition now.

2. Then there’s the question of exactly how these duties are being carried out. It’s unclear which decisions even reach Biden or just who is in charge, according to some accounts. Hunter Biden — like Donald Trump, a convicted felon, who therefore has severe conflicts of interest because of the possibility of a presidential pardon — appears to be playing the role of chief strategist.

3. This naturally compels the question of whether Biden will eventually become the only president other than Nixon to resign — or the first president to have the 25th Amendment invoked against him. The trajectory has been so consistently bad for the White House, worsening even over a 4-day holiday weekend, that the center point of the debate may soon shift from whether he’s fit for a campaign to whether he’s fit for office. At least one Democratic member of Congress has already suggested that he should resign.

4. Furthermore, there’s the question of whether the White House has hidden his condition from the American public. The White House has increasingly tried to shield Biden from public appearances — and after the debate, we know why.

5. On top of that, of course, Biden is also running for re-election, and the Democrats have to officially pick a nominee very soon. There’s the question of whether he’ll be replaced, who the replacement would be, and how the process will unfold.

6. Finally, all of this is conducted against a background where the opponent in the election is Donald Trump. If you think Trump is incredibly bad, that’s all the more reason to cover this story, since Democrats’ actions up to this point have almost certainly materially increased the chances of another Trump presidency.

Of course, the story is also highly compelling:

7. There’s an arc of Shakespearean tragedy: Biden, who was once on track to be a relatively well-regarded historical figure, as King Lear, his judgment clouded by some combination of old age and pride.

8. There’s an element of palace intrigue: who really holds the trump cards within the Democratic Party?

9. There’s the aforementioned question of whether there’s been journalistic bias or even misconduct in coverage of Biden — journalists love talking about journalism.

10. There’s the horse-race angle — polls and predictions are always a popular beat. (I’d be an incredible hypocrite to pretend I have a problem with this. Curiosity about what will happen next is intrinsic to the human condition.) But the horse race is especially compelling this year because Democrats will potentially soon face a decision about who will give them the best chances. Without time for a real primary, polls might act as a substitute.

11. There are some very human dramatic elements about whether there has been some awful miscalculation — staffers thinking they could bluff their way through the campaign with an increasingly infirm candidate, only to have that bluff called in the most embarrassing way with just four months to go. Stories involving flawed human decision-making are naturally more compelling than those involving mere acts of God.

12. Finally, there is another series of questions pertaining to Biden’s most likely replacement, Vice President Harris, who has suddenly gone from a background player to someone who could become president as soon as later this year. There are questions about how and why she was selected in 2020, the pressures she’d face as the first woman president, whether the White House has tried to undermine her, and how she’s playing her cards given the conflicting pressures she faces. Harris’s image is more malleable than Biden’s, potentially giving her more upside for Democrats, but also making her a fertile subject for news coverage.

Media critics can point to factors 7-12 as reasons that the story is sensational — but that obfuscates that it’s also really damned important. No, probably not as important as January 6 — but an order of magnitude more important than many Trump stories, like whether he paid off a porn star.

Progressive media critics are confusing cause and effect

Another trope of progressive media critics is to blame the media for Biden’s challenging position:

But in doing so, they are mistaking cause and effect. It wasn’t the media’s decision to make Biden run for a second term until he was 86. It also wasn’t their decision to put Hunter Biden in a position of power, to refuse to give a press conference or take a cognitive fitness exam, to feed questions to supposedly impartial interviewers, or to fail to remain in touch with Congressional leaders. A rough analogy would be to blame the media for the Enron accounting scandal, or for Watergate. Yes, media coverage grew harsher as the breadth of these scandals widened — but that’s because the fact pattern was extremely unfavorable to the principles. One of the media’s jobs is to hold people in positions of power to account, and there shouldn’t be exceptions just because those people are Democrats.

There’s another way, too, in which these critics confuse cause and effect. They tend to subscribe to a "push” theory of media coverage, in which the media sets the agenda, and this is pushed onto a gullible public. I don’t want to go too deeply into this, because I want to save it for a post of its own — but I think this theory is mostly wrong.

For one thing, it’s actually very hard to persuade people. They tend to be more skeptical than gullible, especially when information comes from sources like the media that they aren’t inherently inclined to trust. And in a free-market economy, media coverage is more demand-side driven than supply-side driven. The New York Times is indeed probably more “both-sides-y” than some of its competitors, but it’s been rewarded in the form of growing subscription numbers at a time when many of its competitors are flailing. If the Times acted like shills for the Biden administration, some percentage of readers would flee for outlets like the Journal instead. Or, on a smaller scale, to Substack or other independent publications, which often pick up on niches and political perspectives that are blind spots for the mainstream media.

Even further downstream, American conservatism generally gains esteem when elite institutions are seen as corrupt and self-serving. If the media reports that Biden is as healthy as ever when he obviously isn’t, or that inflation is all in their heads when a McDonald’s delivery order costs $23, they’ll recognize that they’re being lied to. This is not the only reason that people vote for Trump, certainly — see also, e.g. racial resentment and economic self-interest.

But some critics seem shocked that the New York Times, for instance, isn’t acting as a partisan organ for the Democratic Party. That wouldn’t serve the interests of the public, however, it certainly wouldn’t serve the interests of the Times — and if the past two weeks are any indication, it wouldn’t serve the interests of the Democratic Party anyway. The moment the Good Guys act like they have all the right answers — and that they are even entitled to tell “noble lies” when it suits the public interest — is when they start to become hard to distinguish from the bad guys.

1. Not that I have anything against Taylor Swift or hot dogs.