When the news I self-select to consume agrees with me, it's fair and accurate. When the news I self-select to consume doesn't, it's because the media lives in a right/left echo chamber.
Exactly. Like Nate said, news coverage is often more demand-driven than supply-driven. Reporting the news is a business, and news outlets, whether it's the NYT or Fox News, will always choose the stories that gets them the most clicks or the most views. Since negative coverage always drives more demand than positive coverage, media outlets are going to be a bit biased towards negative news stories, which would inevitably hurt the President. This is why I think the NYT has been shifting their front-page coverage towards global conflicts like the Ukraine war or the Israel-Hamas war; they are stories that are 1) Negative and 2) Out of Biden's control (so to not make him look bad for the paper's left-leaning readers)
The common theme of such complaints is “right wing media is generally ideologically disciplined, we need ‘our’ media ecosystem to follow suit by burying news that is inconvenient to us”.
I watch a lot of football and because this past weekend didn’t have football I watched a few minutes of Fox Business…it was the most unhinged insane political show I’ve ever seen. I honestly don’t think something on YouTube could be as batshit crazy. The host sounded normal for the first 15 seconds and everything after that was how Biden is destroying America.
Approval rating matters in October before an election year…just like polls. Bush governed with his approval ratings in mind and his 8 years were an unmitigated disaster.
I mean that Biden's unprecedented unpopularity calls into question whether or not he has a shot at re-election. Dean Phillips, for example, would answer with a "No".
Great piece! Wisconsin-based reporter here. I spoke to the state Dem chair after Trump’s win in 2016. The state party was livid. Hillary didn’t have a campaign office in the state until after the primaries, he told me, and she never set foot in Wisconsin once during the campaign. I noticed Biden did not repeat that mistake. Hillary ran a bad campaign and I cringe a little when I hear the Big Cope.
The fact that Clinton ran a bad campaign doesn't obviate the possibility that Democrats are correct that the media's obsession with Hillary Clinton's emails might have gifted the White House to Donald Trump. Nate alludes to this in his piece, but, I think it's likely that if *any one* of at least six things had gone differently, Clinton would have won:
1) HRC campaign spends more time in upper Midwest.
2) Puts Bernie on ticket.
3) Puts someone else besides Kane on ticket (I'm not suggesting he was terrible; but it's not inconceivable a more exciting running mate could have netted them another 1 or 2 million votes).
4) More emphasis on kitchen table issues; less on process liberalism/cultural progressivism.
5) Obama appoints someone other than Republican James Comey to the FBI job.
6) Media concludes by spring of 2016 that the emails are a nothingburger, and simply drops the story.
That's six items, that, off the top of my head, might *individually* have translated into a different outcome. Remember, she only needed a few hundred thousand votes to shift in several states (which realistically probably would have required at least another 2 million or so added to her popular vote win...but that's not an impossible number given the size of the third party vote that year).
Trump got very, very lucky. Who knows what history turns on? But yes, no late October story about emails, and she probably prevails..
Whatever the cause, thank God Hillary was defeated. The silliness of both Trump AND Trump Derangement Syndrome will be less memorable than the Teapot Scandal in 70 years .. but Hillary's uncanny and awkwardly patronizing mug would have been staring down at us from Mount Rushmore and legal tender for the next thousand years. She simply did not deserve the honor of being the first woman President of the USA. (Tulsi Gabbard would be awesome, Niki Haley or Warren tolerable, Williamson entertaining .. as far as, um, Kamala .. I guess she would make a better looking statue, but rather not think about it.)
Hillary didn't lose the election because she didn't campaign in WI although maybe that cost her the state. The Clinton campaign put great emphasis in money and visits on PA and FL, both of which she lost. Reporting from locals is valuable to a wider audience but it can suffer from nearsighted provincialism.
No it didn’t. Republicans in the FBI initiated Crossfire Hurricane and McCain handed the Steele Dossier to the FBI and Trump’s own appointee appointed Mueller.
Republicans abandoned it and Democrats picked up on it. Then Hillary commissioned the Steele dossier. Mood is on sworn testimony admitting it. Hillary engaged an unregistered foreign agent in Steele who went to his Russian contacts and got a pack of lies used to smear Trump. The Russian collusion was Hillary’s. She did more damage to the us than Trump ever could by dragging us thru the hoax and two dubious impeachments. Trump accomplished quite a bit of good despite the left and media’s shadow coup. Imagine what good he could have done if left to do his job like all presidents before him.
Hillary threw the Steele Dossier in the trash where it belonged. McStain was the rat that scrounged around in the trash and got it and handed it to the Republicans running the FBI. Then Trump’s own appointee appointed Mueller because he had more respect for Comey than Trump.
Not to defend Hillary, but I suppose my question would be, how did that differ from Obama's campaigns in the state? Or for that matter, Kerry's?
The Presidential vote in WI had been close before but the state hadn't voted R since Reagan. I honestly don't know how hard the Dems had fought for all those wins though. I remember listening to Republicans criticize campaigns like Romney's and maybe even W. Bush's for wasting time in places like PA and MI (WI not mentioned as much). I was inclined to think I wouldn't live to see those states vote for an R President again.
The 2016 10-point swing in MI, in particular, was really incredible, against the backdrop of only a 2-point improvement in the popular vote. IA shifted even further, though it had been a swing state before. This seems really difficult to plan for. Even 1 month out, people were predicting these states to barely shift their partisan lean. When was the last time states shifted this far in their partisan lean in 4 years?
I came up with one example, and it's a really funny one: MN in 1984. Mondale did worse than Carter and nearly lost the state, but against the backdrop of Reagan's 18-point national landslide, it represents a hard shift to the Democrats.
Alright, when was the last time a state shifted 8+ points in partisan lean, it involved the state both flipping parties and flipping its partisan lean from the previous election, and it wasn't a candidate's home state? I know this happened to a number of states in 1932 (Oklahoma being the most predictable one). I'm not sure if it happened once between then and 2016.
Obama made several stops to Wisconsin, including to my small city smack dab in the middle of the state. Following the 2016 election, we examined ward-level data and it's mathematically impossible for there not to have been overlap between Obama voters in 2012 and Trump voters in 2016. Wisconsin is a purple state - while the state was voting for Obama in 2012, it was also voting for Scott Walker for governor in the two years before and after, and has had a Republican majority statehouse for as long as I can remember (though that's in big part due to heavily gerrymandered districts). Wisconsin is a purple state and should never be taken for granted. Obama didn't and neither has Biden, with both him and Harris making stops here.
Of course there was much more going on than just her lack of presence in WI. Populist and anti-establishment sentiment was strong on both sides. But that should have signaled that more attention should be paid to states such as Wisconsin.
Just because NYT staffers aren't sympathetic to Republicans doesn't mean they can't be excessively unfair to POTUS. The fact is the media environment has been tuned to fire on Biden from all angles since August 2021 - this comes from the far left and the right. The tilt of the economic reporting over the last year and a half is the best proof of this.
Ostensibly left-wing writers that work for the Papers of Record that have always infected their reporting with anti-Biden "but her emails" include Astead Herndon and Jeff Stein.
Other than Obama, media has generally been far more critical of the sitting president than not. I think this is generally a good thing. That there are articles about Biden is obviously not surprising since he's President of the US, and that they are negative isn't surprising either given his many obvious flaws and the baseline of media being critical. Even then it took some time before his age was talked about openly, and the Hunter stuff is being talked about a lot less than I think would have happened with previous presidents - including Obama.
I'd be very curious to see a survey of media criticism of sitting presidents from say, 1976 to present and see which presidents were more criticized (and how legitimate those are seen in retrospect). My gut is that Biden is getting far less criticism than historical averages. I'm definitely thinking of Bill Clinton here, but I think most presidents in the last 50 years saw more criticism in the media.
The problem is you are not factoring in the right wing echo chamber…so that is 100% unhinged negativity 24/7. You can literally watch and listen and read unhinged negativity about a Democrat every waking hour and it’s been that way since the early 2000s. Unfortunately the only individual to ever benefit from the right wing echo chamber was Bush because the mainstream media was caught off guard and didn’t course correct until after 2004.
I would argue every far-right Republican that's entered government since 2016 has benefitted from right-wing echo chambers, no other way they could win votes with the wacky stuff they say.
You underestimate how many people vote against the wacky things leftists say, which aren't necessarily crazier, but they're far more endemic in pop culture. Patriotic but crazy is a hell of a lot better for a lot of people than elitist and crazy.
What is patriotic about setting up plans to rig the election? What is patriotic about saying that Putin is a role model and better than Biden? What is patriotic about denying poor Americans in red states health coverage?
None of what you said is true about Republicans or conservatives, if that is who you mean .. actually I've heard no one support those views or actions. Name one. (Direct full context quotes, not Media Matters oppo research cherry pickings.)
They benefit but an equilibrium has been established. So in 2000 and 2004 Bush benefited in an outsized manner and because he was wholly unfit to be president the right wing echo chamber ended up destroying his presidency. The key metric I point out is Bush hit over 80% approval for failing to prevent 9/11 while Obama hit 56% approval for a few days when he successfully killed Bin Laden. So you can see the right wing echo chamber at work in both instances while in 2001 the mainstream media hadn’t figured out how to deal with the right wing echo chambers.
Btw, I am convinced Tucker Carlson believes the Democrats mistreated Bush and they just got lucky Iraq ended up being an unmitigated disaster…so all of his nonsense regarding Putin and Ukraine is motivated by his belief that Democrats mistreated Bush and this gives him carte blanche to be as irresponsible as possible in turning people against Ukraine and Zelensky.
Do you think people make independent decisions about what they like or dislike separate from what they hear in the media? From your response, it seems that you think that the media completely overrides how people would have felt otherwise.
I think Tucker has just full-on drank the authoritarian Kool-Aid, and that's why he loves Trump and Putin so much. The idea someone that opportunistic is still motivated by something almost 2 decades ago is a tad unlikely.
Carlson doesn't love anything. He doesn't have the ability to drink the Kool aid. It's pure cynical self-aggrandizement and enrichment. He's even admitted as much, it came out during the fox news defamation lawsuit.
Republicans involved in politics under Bush/Cheney carry butthurt with them…trust me, it’s obvious if you opposed Bush how invested Republicans got into Bush and how unfair they believe everything ended up working out. Remember, the Republican establishment did everything in their power to stop Trump and his new primary voters powered him to victory in 2016. So Trump’s base were moderates from the same counties as Hillary 2008 voters.
Super interesting Nate. But, why look at news stories on just one day (i.e. Tuesday)? Also, why not pick a day of vast news readership (Sunday? Monday?), or better, supplement the Tuesday chart with the rest of the days by the various buckets you identified (Trump legal troubles, Ukraine, Israel/Gaza etc.) to get a fuller sense. Second major concern with this analysis is that you take only the "Indigo Blob", which is probably not the blob that those 80K who voted for Trump (vs. Clinton) in 2016 got their news from... Unfortunately Fox (and now many further Trumpian "news" outlets) would be what we'd need to look at to understand the bias that actually matters in Presidential elections, no?
Data journalism must be hard. To add, is the lead story really a proxy for coverage? I suspect the story would change if it looked at the top 10 stories on all days.
But the 80k voters who tipped the election are, by definition, swing voters. They're very unlikely to get their news from Fox. Most are probably low information voters who get into from an amalgam of local network news, stories shared in social media, word of mouth, etc. The indigo blob is a decent proxy here.
I wonder about what I would describe as the 'both sides' bias, the idea that instead of searching for facts to determine the truth about a situation, news media just seeks the view of 'both sides'. If one side is significantly more dishonest or deluded than the other, 'both sides' skews the reporting. For example, almost everything if not everything the anti-abortion movement says can be demonstrated to be untrue or completely dependent on religious faith. And I'm sure we could pick issues where the prevailing progressive viewpoint is based on false information too. But it's easier - it's certainly safer - to just do 'both sides' and let the country go to hell.
I suppose the accurate version of this would be "The Nazis want to kill 15 million Jews, the Allies say we should kill none, does the compromise of 6 million favour the Allied side?"
The public already has a nuanced and moderate position on abortion: it should be legal until about 18 to 24 weeks and after that it should be illegal. Extremists on both sides deviate from that position.
When the public are told the actual circumstances that lead to an abortion after that time period, they support that option. What they oppose are elective abortions late, which do not happen. This is an example of the nonsense spewed by the anti-abortion movement. The horrors of the world after Dobbs are exposing their lies, but the stories need more reach and more emphasis. If men had to endure even a tiny fraction of what women are being subjected to, none of this would ever have been allowed to happen. And you just did EXACTLY what I criticized when you said 'extremists on both sides'. If you can't tell the difference that's exactly because the national conversation has been driven by the misguided belief in false equality, instead of by the facts.
The point was that cis men don't get pregnant, and that we don't know what their attitudes would be if they did. Speaking as a man, I strongly suspect our sense of entitlement and predisposition to being whiny and intolerant would mean we wouldn't suffer as gladly as women do.
Gosnell was a monster. There's nothing normal about anything related to his case, and he was shunned by all legitimate OBGYNs long before he got caught. I don't know how or why he got his patients and that information would be useful. Later term abortions are more complicated and expensive procedures, hardly done on a whim. Women who don't want to be pregnant have the procedure done as soon as possible. If it's late there's another reason. Anti-abortion wants us to believe Kermit Gosnell is typical, but I don't think they've found any others and believe me they're motivated. It reminds me of when Reagan took the Linda Taylor story, a sociopath if there ever was one, and convinced millions of Americans that poor people were like that. One sensational anecdote against the larger data and evidence. If they did have legitimate examples supporting their arguments, now would be the time to bring them out, when you have women going septic and almost dying, women forced to be walking coffins for babies that are going to die a painful death after birth, and so many more.
Yes. There's more than enough medical malpractice there. That's the reason for the safe in safe and legal. And delivering an infant and killing it is not what an abortion is, despite what Donald Trump says. Legitimate doctors are not going to terminate a pregnancy that would be viable outside the uterus because it's less complicated to just do a c-section. Unless in some specific case it's impossible to both save the pregnant person and deliver. That's why doctors should be making these decisions. I understand there was a case where George Tiller performed a late procedure on a 10-year old patient which was controversial, but I don't know of any other examples, and anti-abortion has all the motivation in the world to find them. In cases in which advanced care is needed, there are a handful of practitioners in places like Colorado and Maryland who are qualified to treat these patients. Again I don't have specifics on Gosnell's patients, but if they had seen a reputable OBGYN at any point in their pregnancy they shouldn't have ended up there. Providing good reproductive health care to women both before and throughout pregnancy will reduce the instances of tragedy. An OBGYN can answer these questions better and with much more specificity than I can. No one is arguing in favor of medical malpractice.
Two sides journalism is still prevalent, but has declined with the rise of analysis (e.g. infused with the reporter's opinion) journalism. The recent James Bennnet essay on his time at NYT speaks to this.
"The Big Cope as the belief that Democrats would win every competitive election if only it weren’t for unfair media coverage."
I don't know what world you're living in Nate, but The Big Cope sounds like a larger Republicans symptom. A victimization mentality has infected the GOP on nearly every level.
Blaming the media is a dumb argument from both sides, while occasionally being true. It's like complaining about the refs in sports: they are often awful, occasionally relevant and rarely pivotal. Most of the time you lose based on your performance and strategy but the refs/media.
When Trump ran for the GOP nomination in 2016, he was only one of 17 candidates.
The mainstream media gave him more than TWICE the coverage it gave the other 16 candidates COMBINED. Then it marveled at how unstoppable he was!
They didn’t just put their thumb on the scale, the jumped on with both ass cheeks while they bounced up and down.
HRC was oblivious in a bubble of her yes-underlings, ignoring the alarm bells going off in MI, PA and WI for months. Late in October she was balking at making appearances in MI and WI because Obama had made those Blue States. If she made appearances there the media might pounce on her and say in was a sign of weakness. You know what else is a sign of weakness? Losing those states on Election Day!
This partisan media climate excels at jacking up negatives of the opposing candidate. So being underestimated is an advantage because the partisan media will focus on a different candidate and jack up their negatives. Obama and Trump and Biden were all underestimated and ended up as president. Hillary should never have been the nominee and Democrats should have had competitive nominating process to select a candidate.
As a Gen Zer, it seems remarkably obvious that if the Democrats stopped whining about the media and just did their best to actually deliver on the promises they made to my generation to get us to vote for them, they wouldn't have to worry about coverage favorable or unfavorable. But alas they have taken the Republican strategy of just shouting 'fake news' and saying 'the other party is worse' when confronted about their failures. The DNC will blame EVERYONE else but Biden if Biden loses in November, and it's so obvious to anyone with a brain.
How can they deliver when Republicans in Congress blocks everything (especially popular policies), from border control measures to Ukraine funding to infrastructure spending to bank regulations?
Out of curiosity which promises are you referring to? There has been a pretty good faith effort to deliver on most campaign promises from 2020 out of the Biden team. And a frankly impressive retinue of passed legislation the likes we haven't seen from a president and congress in a LONG time.
If your complaint is that it should happen faster, well then you're just kind of ignorant of how our political process works.
Biden promised legal weed, cancellation of *most* student debt, $2,000 stimulus checks, an end to the fascist threat posed by Trump, the ability to work across the aisle and be the "bipartisan" candidate, and a widespread COVID vaccine rollout. Out of all that, we got... the vaccine rollout. No marijuana legalization, only 7% of student debt cancelled, no $2k stimulus checks even with a senate majority, and Trump now poses a greater threat to America than ever before. The climate plan also got turned into a bunch of "carrots" (incentives that companies can choose to take advantage of) rather than "sticks" (hard regulation that forces companies make green changes) and the Biden admin has actively bypassed congress to send weapons to fund an ethnostate's military campaign against civilians. But hey, the stock market is at an all-time high and the rich are getting richer than ever before, so what's there to complain about? At least he fulfilled his promise that "nothing significant will change" while he was in office...
* "cancellation of *most* student debt" He doesn't have the authority to do that as shown by the conservative supreme court shutting down his modest attempts so far. Can't say he didn't try, not going to pass in a contested congress.
* "an end to the fascist threat posed by Trump", Trump's not president anymore and being prosecuted in a variety of cases. What more do you want? The justice system turns slowly (and for good reason).
* "the ability to work across the aisle and be the "bipartisan" candidate" Biden has passed a HUGE amount of bipartisan legislation. Like historically it's really really impressive what he has accomplished with a divided congress.
* "The climate plan also got turned into a bunch of "carrots"" , You request bipartisan legislation then get upset that bipartisan legislation is basically, "Shit everyone can agree on, aka carrots"?
* "Biden admin has actively bypassed congress to send weapons to fund an ethnostate's military campaign against civilians". This is probably the most legit complaint in your list.
The president isn't a dictator. If you think he can wave his hand and make all this stuff happen you're naive. He's made good faith efforts on all of these to the extent that he has the authority.
Frankly it sounds like your complaint is that politician's should add a bunch of caveats about congress and the reality of passing laws to their political stump speeches/goals. Which is just kind of silly. Give Biden a 60 vote super majority in the senate and you'll really start to see the legislative progress you desire, otherwise you're going to have to be content with the bipartisan stuff and put the blame where it really belongs.
As with any other liberal, all you can do is provide a bunch of weak excuses for Biden's failings and no actual arguments for him. Try again, this deflecting of responsibility that his administration is so brilliant at doing is why he has a sub-40% approval rating.
I find it exceptionally dense that you call the IRA "bipartisan legislation" when quite literally every Republican in congress voted against it. You walked face first into the point and missed it, my complaint was that Biden said he was the "bipartisan" candidate and then had to pass all major bills on party lines, so if every member of the opposition refuses to be appeased by carrots then bring out the sticks for Christ's sake.
"Give Biden a 60 vote super majority in the Senate"
...have you seen the 2024 Senate map? If a Senate majority is what you want, might as well hope Trump wins in 2024 so we get another blue tidal wave in 2026 similar to 2028. The deck is stacked so absurdly in favor of Republicans for at least the next 10 years when it comes to Senate seats that a weak Dem in the White House is the only nail needed in the coffin for a Blue senate.
If Biden loses, and he very well might, it will be because he has completely failed to project a persona of "strength" and really just a failure to inspire any sort confidence in anybody my age that he can actually change things. If the solution is to have more Dems in Congress, Trump being in office would actually be better for accomplishing that goal. Red or Blue, the extraction of profit from the lower class to be accumulated in exorbitant amounts by the wealthy will not stop. As a leftist, why would I vote for either candidate when they're both self-declared capitalists? My only goal is the downfall of American capitalism, so wouldn't the better option be the guy who will accelerate it's internal contradictions and inevitable decline rather than the one flailing to keep it barely afloat?
The other party and the constitution - the system they are required to govern under - are the source of their failures. If the Democrats lose in November, the party will become irrelevant. There will be only the ruling regime and whoever becomes the most effective resistance to it, and anyone capable of losing this election won't qualify.
Hi Nate, I've long loved your work and own the Signal and the Noise, but I'm commenting for the first time because I need to express that this piece is perhaps the weakest of yours I've read - it does not have the rigor youre known for. I'm admittedly on the liberal side, but my points are valid nonetheless. You may be right or wrong, but your thinking here is not consistent; indeed, it seems you began with a premise and worked backwards to try to justify it:
1. By your own source, Hunter was not censored by the Indigo blob, the story had only limited censoring on Facebook;
2. Discussing "Cancel Culture" at all is not a strong decision - there are MANY definitions (are angry tweets being "cancelled"? A Nazi not being allowed to speak at a college? Someone being rightfully fired for sexual impropriety at work?);
3. Implying cancel culture is solely a liberal issue here is disingenuous - while yes, the right has pinned it on them, the right utilizes it equally as much (coffee cups, kneeling and the NFL, book banning/author cancelling, Disney, Bud Light, Taylor Swift, etc.);
4. Your Memeoradnum "data" is almost irrelevant - saying that the top news story is about a literal war instead of, say, Kevin Hart not being allowed to present an awards show because of "cancel culture" is a wildly inconsistent way to try to prove a paper is overly liberal - Hart should never be the top story over a war but who knows, he may very well be, say, the second story;
5. Similarly, Biden's age - yes he's old, but Trump is nearly indistinguishably old, and neither is a "breaking" story, so why would either either be a top news story when there's nothing new to report?
6. We dont know if deplatforming Trump on Twitter "worked" (depending on how you define worked), but it surely minimized his reach, and your "data" simply showing approval ratings is, frankly, poor journalism and worse science. We all know what confounders are, and approval ratings would require a novel to list out them all out;
7. "There is a lot of Trump coverage in the mainstream media. A lot, most of it quite negative." Yes, he has 91 criminal charges and started an insurrection! This is extremely odd - even highly biased - phrasing for you to use given that context;
8. Lastly, I think the very premise of the "The Big Cope" is a straw man - very few people think that simple unbalanced media coverage across the board is the problem, but instead, it's the more nuanced idea that a subsection of people are wrapped tightly in an impenetrable bubble of disinformation via Fox, Facebook/Twitter, OAN/Newsmax, Joe Rogan, etc.
The issue is NOT "are mainstream newspapers slightly left of center," but :
a) the extreme amount of censoring and outright mis/disinformation on rightwing outlets(and evidence against an incorrect belief heard once takes roughly 6 instances of being refuted to be updated in one's head, so there is an imbalance); paired with
b) the fact that many people get their news SOLELY from those sources. (While liberals may be in a bubble, as well, I'd argue it's far less intense, as, e.g., the NYTimes is nowhere near as extreme as those rightwing sources, and the bubble still receives far-right ideas via Facebook, Twitter, from Trump/MTG/Boebert/etc., and opinion pieces.) If these widely held beliefs are wrong, that would be a great piece for you to write! Also: will you write a similar article assessing how the Trump indictments have been (not) covered by the "Maroon Blob"?
Nate, in general, I love your work and visited 538 nearly daily when you were there. Truly great stuff. But this piece shows a lack of attention to detail, a use of incomplete data to justify an idea you'd previously developed, and a very weak use of data. You have reach and power to influence people, so please, continue to provide criticism of both sides, but use it wisely: it must be stronger than this! Looking forward to it
Great article but I have to quibble with you regurgitating the Dem talking points on the border bill failure. The GOP demanded we close the border, this bill doesn't even come close to doing that. Whether or not Trump said anything about it this would still be the case and it still wouldn't have the votes. They want their Ukraine forever war funding? Attach it to HR2 and watch the law get approved quickly. Hell, Trump would probably come out and support it. A huge win for everyone except those who want to keep importing illegals for whatever purpose.
I think that the methodology here is flawed: the vast majority of people do not read the NY Times on paper or by going to the website. They click through from a link to a specific article that is shared on social media, usually not by someone that the NY Times has any influence over.
The only scale that the NY Times can put its finger on is the absolute number of articles published on a particular story. It doesn't matter if they're A1-above-the-fold, because there is no fold and no A1 any more. They can't bury a story any more other than by not publishing it at all.
And I think there is a fair criticism that - because conservatives are much better at sticking to a single story and finding new angles on it - a single story will generate more articles than a typical liberal narrative. And if you take the position that 50 articles running on one story, which reinforce each other, are more effective than many hundreds of articles each being the only article on a different story (which is, at least, a plausible position), then I can see a case for saying that the NY Times' news judgement is biased in a conservative direction. This is the "have you written the same story 100 times? Only then have you written the story at all" position.
That would imply that the NY Times should maintain a leaderboard (internally) on how many articles it has run on each story and question whether that aligns with its internal perception of the importance of the stories. I don't think you could operate a newsroom like that, but it's not wholly impossible.
But I think there's another factor. It's not even the number of stories, it's the ones that go viral. And one thing that will consistently help NY Times stories go viral is being elevated by conservatives, because to a conservative the fact that "even the liberal" NY Times is running a story elevates it to something real and not just a conservative-media-only story, and thus makes it more convincing. The NY Times running a story that conforms to a liberal narrative is expected and therefore gains little or no traction for the fact the NY Times ran it, even from liberals. It has to get traction for just the content of the story.
The problem, for liberals, is that there are very few examples of "even the conservative" Fox News running a story that conforms to a liberal narrative and lots of examples of the NY Times conforming to a conservative narrative. That means that they can't respond in kind.
But, if you write that out as a prescription, unlike the "leaderboard of stories", it calls for the NY Times to refuse to run any story that can be used by a conservative to reinforce a conservative narrative. This is absolutely a demand for the Times to be ideologically disciplined as liberal media. It's an "if a GOP representative tweets out a story we ran, we should pull the story and be ashamed of that fact" position. And when you actually write that as a specific demand, it's instantly apparent why the NY Times is never going to do that.
Liberals try to be fair; conservatives don't. And that's why conservatives win. We are not equipped in this country to handle the monster they have created.
I'm inclined to agree on personal bias, I'm not sure the Memeorandom an NYT listings are persuasive if it's just listing the most important story. It could still be that these topics get too much currency in their zone of importance. A topic like "cancel culture" was unlikely to ever make the front page of the NYT without a specific scandal being national newsworthy.
To claim that Trump catalyzed a populist reaction in the US is to ignore Brexit, Boris Johnson, Urban, Duterte, Bolsonaro and more recently Wilders and Milei.
Given the plethora of examples from abroad I think it's more technically correct to say that Trump is the American expression of a populist movement that is sweeping the planet. There are other important dimensions (the gender divide in Western Europe with men trending conservative while women trend liberal, for example) that the rest of the world shares with the United States.
When the news I self-select to consume agrees with me, it's fair and accurate. When the news I self-select to consume doesn't, it's because the media lives in a right/left echo chamber.
Exactly. Like Nate said, news coverage is often more demand-driven than supply-driven. Reporting the news is a business, and news outlets, whether it's the NYT or Fox News, will always choose the stories that gets them the most clicks or the most views. Since negative coverage always drives more demand than positive coverage, media outlets are going to be a bit biased towards negative news stories, which would inevitably hurt the President. This is why I think the NYT has been shifting their front-page coverage towards global conflicts like the Ukraine war or the Israel-Hamas war; they are stories that are 1) Negative and 2) Out of Biden's control (so to not make him look bad for the paper's left-leaning readers)
The common theme of such complaints is “right wing media is generally ideologically disciplined, we need ‘our’ media ecosystem to follow suit by burying news that is inconvenient to us”.
I watch a lot of football and because this past weekend didn’t have football I watched a few minutes of Fox Business…it was the most unhinged insane political show I’ve ever seen. I honestly don’t think something on YouTube could be as batshit crazy. The host sounded normal for the first 15 seconds and everything after that was how Biden is destroying America.
Look at the polling. Biden's numbers are atrocious. Fox may be closer to the national mood than CNN, etc. It certainly has better ratings.
Right, just like 2004.
Except Biden's approval rating at this point in time is much, much lower. In fact it's the worst in modern history.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4373344-biden-year-end-rating-worst-modern-day-presidents-seeking-reelection-gallup/
Approval rating matters in October before an election year…just like polls. Bush governed with his approval ratings in mind and his 8 years were an unmitigated disaster.
I mean that Biden's unprecedented unpopularity calls into question whether or not he has a shot at re-election. Dean Phillips, for example, would answer with a "No".
Great piece! Wisconsin-based reporter here. I spoke to the state Dem chair after Trump’s win in 2016. The state party was livid. Hillary didn’t have a campaign office in the state until after the primaries, he told me, and she never set foot in Wisconsin once during the campaign. I noticed Biden did not repeat that mistake. Hillary ran a bad campaign and I cringe a little when I hear the Big Cope.
The fact that Clinton ran a bad campaign doesn't obviate the possibility that Democrats are correct that the media's obsession with Hillary Clinton's emails might have gifted the White House to Donald Trump. Nate alludes to this in his piece, but, I think it's likely that if *any one* of at least six things had gone differently, Clinton would have won:
1) HRC campaign spends more time in upper Midwest.
2) Puts Bernie on ticket.
3) Puts someone else besides Kane on ticket (I'm not suggesting he was terrible; but it's not inconceivable a more exciting running mate could have netted them another 1 or 2 million votes).
4) More emphasis on kitchen table issues; less on process liberalism/cultural progressivism.
5) Obama appoints someone other than Republican James Comey to the FBI job.
6) Media concludes by spring of 2016 that the emails are a nothingburger, and simply drops the story.
That's six items, that, off the top of my head, might *individually* have translated into a different outcome. Remember, she only needed a few hundred thousand votes to shift in several states (which realistically probably would have required at least another 2 million or so added to her popular vote win...but that's not an impossible number given the size of the third party vote that year).
Trump got very, very lucky. Who knows what history turns on? But yes, no late October story about emails, and she probably prevails..
Whatever the cause, thank God Hillary was defeated. The silliness of both Trump AND Trump Derangement Syndrome will be less memorable than the Teapot Scandal in 70 years .. but Hillary's uncanny and awkwardly patronizing mug would have been staring down at us from Mount Rushmore and legal tender for the next thousand years. She simply did not deserve the honor of being the first woman President of the USA. (Tulsi Gabbard would be awesome, Niki Haley or Warren tolerable, Williamson entertaining .. as far as, um, Kamala .. I guess she would make a better looking statue, but rather not think about it.)
Seems to me Jan 6 made TDS actually a correct realization of a threat. Its called patriotism
Hillary didn't lose the election because she didn't campaign in WI although maybe that cost her the state. The Clinton campaign put great emphasis in money and visits on PA and FL, both of which she lost. Reporting from locals is valuable to a wider audience but it can suffer from nearsighted provincialism.
Remember Robby Mook?? Whatever happened to him?? He probably has a Substack and a podcast. ;)
He should be doing time for perpetrating the whole Russian Collusion hoax on America.
Actually Republicans started that. Remember they were saying Hillary was a compromised candidate because Russia hacked her private server??
Hillary commissioned the Steele Dossier which kicked the whole thing off.
No it didn’t. Republicans in the FBI initiated Crossfire Hurricane and McCain handed the Steele Dossier to the FBI and Trump’s own appointee appointed Mueller.
LOL
Tomato tomahto.
Republicans abandoned it and Democrats picked up on it. Then Hillary commissioned the Steele dossier. Mood is on sworn testimony admitting it. Hillary engaged an unregistered foreign agent in Steele who went to his Russian contacts and got a pack of lies used to smear Trump. The Russian collusion was Hillary’s. She did more damage to the us than Trump ever could by dragging us thru the hoax and two dubious impeachments. Trump accomplished quite a bit of good despite the left and media’s shadow coup. Imagine what good he could have done if left to do his job like all presidents before him.
Hillary threw the Steele Dossier in the trash where it belonged. McStain was the rat that scrounged around in the trash and got it and handed it to the Republicans running the FBI. Then Trump’s own appointee appointed Mueller because he had more respect for Comey than Trump.
🤣🤣🤣
Not to defend Hillary, but I suppose my question would be, how did that differ from Obama's campaigns in the state? Or for that matter, Kerry's?
The Presidential vote in WI had been close before but the state hadn't voted R since Reagan. I honestly don't know how hard the Dems had fought for all those wins though. I remember listening to Republicans criticize campaigns like Romney's and maybe even W. Bush's for wasting time in places like PA and MI (WI not mentioned as much). I was inclined to think I wouldn't live to see those states vote for an R President again.
The 2016 10-point swing in MI, in particular, was really incredible, against the backdrop of only a 2-point improvement in the popular vote. IA shifted even further, though it had been a swing state before. This seems really difficult to plan for. Even 1 month out, people were predicting these states to barely shift their partisan lean. When was the last time states shifted this far in their partisan lean in 4 years?
I came up with one example, and it's a really funny one: MN in 1984. Mondale did worse than Carter and nearly lost the state, but against the backdrop of Reagan's 18-point national landslide, it represents a hard shift to the Democrats.
Alright, when was the last time a state shifted 8+ points in partisan lean, it involved the state both flipping parties and flipping its partisan lean from the previous election, and it wasn't a candidate's home state? I know this happened to a number of states in 1932 (Oklahoma being the most predictable one). I'm not sure if it happened once between then and 2016.
Obama made several stops to Wisconsin, including to my small city smack dab in the middle of the state. Following the 2016 election, we examined ward-level data and it's mathematically impossible for there not to have been overlap between Obama voters in 2012 and Trump voters in 2016. Wisconsin is a purple state - while the state was voting for Obama in 2012, it was also voting for Scott Walker for governor in the two years before and after, and has had a Republican majority statehouse for as long as I can remember (though that's in big part due to heavily gerrymandered districts). Wisconsin is a purple state and should never be taken for granted. Obama didn't and neither has Biden, with both him and Harris making stops here.
Of course there was much more going on than just her lack of presence in WI. Populist and anti-establishment sentiment was strong on both sides. But that should have signaled that more attention should be paid to states such as Wisconsin.
West Virginia flipped but is was over several cycles.
Just because NYT staffers aren't sympathetic to Republicans doesn't mean they can't be excessively unfair to POTUS. The fact is the media environment has been tuned to fire on Biden from all angles since August 2021 - this comes from the far left and the right. The tilt of the economic reporting over the last year and a half is the best proof of this.
Ostensibly left-wing writers that work for the Papers of Record that have always infected their reporting with anti-Biden "but her emails" include Astead Herndon and Jeff Stein.
Other than Obama, media has generally been far more critical of the sitting president than not. I think this is generally a good thing. That there are articles about Biden is obviously not surprising since he's President of the US, and that they are negative isn't surprising either given his many obvious flaws and the baseline of media being critical. Even then it took some time before his age was talked about openly, and the Hunter stuff is being talked about a lot less than I think would have happened with previous presidents - including Obama.
I'd be very curious to see a survey of media criticism of sitting presidents from say, 1976 to present and see which presidents were more criticized (and how legitimate those are seen in retrospect). My gut is that Biden is getting far less criticism than historical averages. I'm definitely thinking of Bill Clinton here, but I think most presidents in the last 50 years saw more criticism in the media.
The problem is you are not factoring in the right wing echo chamber…so that is 100% unhinged negativity 24/7. You can literally watch and listen and read unhinged negativity about a Democrat every waking hour and it’s been that way since the early 2000s. Unfortunately the only individual to ever benefit from the right wing echo chamber was Bush because the mainstream media was caught off guard and didn’t course correct until after 2004.
I would argue every far-right Republican that's entered government since 2016 has benefitted from right-wing echo chambers, no other way they could win votes with the wacky stuff they say.
You underestimate how many people vote against the wacky things leftists say, which aren't necessarily crazier, but they're far more endemic in pop culture. Patriotic but crazy is a hell of a lot better for a lot of people than elitist and crazy.
What is patriotic about setting up plans to rig the election? What is patriotic about saying that Putin is a role model and better than Biden? What is patriotic about denying poor Americans in red states health coverage?
Trump voters aren't reading your comments. You're not convincing anyone here that Trump isn't a patriot, we already know that.
None of what you said is true about Republicans or conservatives, if that is who you mean .. actually I've heard no one support those views or actions. Name one. (Direct full context quotes, not Media Matters oppo research cherry pickings.)
Such as?
They benefit but an equilibrium has been established. So in 2000 and 2004 Bush benefited in an outsized manner and because he was wholly unfit to be president the right wing echo chamber ended up destroying his presidency. The key metric I point out is Bush hit over 80% approval for failing to prevent 9/11 while Obama hit 56% approval for a few days when he successfully killed Bin Laden. So you can see the right wing echo chamber at work in both instances while in 2001 the mainstream media hadn’t figured out how to deal with the right wing echo chambers.
Btw, I am convinced Tucker Carlson believes the Democrats mistreated Bush and they just got lucky Iraq ended up being an unmitigated disaster…so all of his nonsense regarding Putin and Ukraine is motivated by his belief that Democrats mistreated Bush and this gives him carte blanche to be as irresponsible as possible in turning people against Ukraine and Zelensky.
Do you think people make independent decisions about what they like or dislike separate from what they hear in the media? From your response, it seems that you think that the media completely overrides how people would have felt otherwise.
I think Tucker has just full-on drank the authoritarian Kool-Aid, and that's why he loves Trump and Putin so much. The idea someone that opportunistic is still motivated by something almost 2 decades ago is a tad unlikely.
Carlson doesn't love anything. He doesn't have the ability to drink the Kool aid. It's pure cynical self-aggrandizement and enrichment. He's even admitted as much, it came out during the fox news defamation lawsuit.
Republicans involved in politics under Bush/Cheney carry butthurt with them…trust me, it’s obvious if you opposed Bush how invested Republicans got into Bush and how unfair they believe everything ended up working out. Remember, the Republican establishment did everything in their power to stop Trump and his new primary voters powered him to victory in 2016. So Trump’s base were moderates from the same counties as Hillary 2008 voters.
Super interesting Nate. But, why look at news stories on just one day (i.e. Tuesday)? Also, why not pick a day of vast news readership (Sunday? Monday?), or better, supplement the Tuesday chart with the rest of the days by the various buckets you identified (Trump legal troubles, Ukraine, Israel/Gaza etc.) to get a fuller sense. Second major concern with this analysis is that you take only the "Indigo Blob", which is probably not the blob that those 80K who voted for Trump (vs. Clinton) in 2016 got their news from... Unfortunately Fox (and now many further Trumpian "news" outlets) would be what we'd need to look at to understand the bias that actually matters in Presidential elections, no?
Data journalism must be hard. To add, is the lead story really a proxy for coverage? I suspect the story would change if it looked at the top 10 stories on all days.
But the 80k voters who tipped the election are, by definition, swing voters. They're very unlikely to get their news from Fox. Most are probably low information voters who get into from an amalgam of local network news, stories shared in social media, word of mouth, etc. The indigo blob is a decent proxy here.
I wonder about what I would describe as the 'both sides' bias, the idea that instead of searching for facts to determine the truth about a situation, news media just seeks the view of 'both sides'. If one side is significantly more dishonest or deluded than the other, 'both sides' skews the reporting. For example, almost everything if not everything the anti-abortion movement says can be demonstrated to be untrue or completely dependent on religious faith. And I'm sure we could pick issues where the prevailing progressive viewpoint is based on false information too. But it's easier - it's certainly safer - to just do 'both sides' and let the country go to hell.
"The Nazis want to kill 6 million Jews, the Allies say we should kill none... Is there a rational position between these 2 extremes?"
I suppose the accurate version of this would be "The Nazis want to kill 15 million Jews, the Allies say we should kill none, does the compromise of 6 million favour the Allied side?"
(apologies for how dark this got)
Not at all, that's a perfect response!
Third trimester abortions.
The public already has a nuanced and moderate position on abortion: it should be legal until about 18 to 24 weeks and after that it should be illegal. Extremists on both sides deviate from that position.
When the public are told the actual circumstances that lead to an abortion after that time period, they support that option. What they oppose are elective abortions late, which do not happen. This is an example of the nonsense spewed by the anti-abortion movement. The horrors of the world after Dobbs are exposing their lies, but the stories need more reach and more emphasis. If men had to endure even a tiny fraction of what women are being subjected to, none of this would ever have been allowed to happen. And you just did EXACTLY what I criticized when you said 'extremists on both sides'. If you can't tell the difference that's exactly because the national conversation has been driven by the misguided belief in false equality, instead of by the facts.
> If men had to endure even a tiny fraction of what women are being subjected to, none of this would ever have been allowed to happen.
Men and women have surprisingly similar attitudes towards abortion, google "attitudes towards abortion by gender".
The point was that cis men don't get pregnant, and that we don't know what their attitudes would be if they did. Speaking as a man, I strongly suspect our sense of entitlement and predisposition to being whiny and intolerant would mean we wouldn't suffer as gladly as women do.
No men get pregnant.
Cis? Good grief.
It's pretty much us guys who are desperate to keep abortion legal, convenient, cheap, and most of all QUICK.
Kermit Gosnell.
Gosnell was a monster. There's nothing normal about anything related to his case, and he was shunned by all legitimate OBGYNs long before he got caught. I don't know how or why he got his patients and that information would be useful. Later term abortions are more complicated and expensive procedures, hardly done on a whim. Women who don't want to be pregnant have the procedure done as soon as possible. If it's late there's another reason. Anti-abortion wants us to believe Kermit Gosnell is typical, but I don't think they've found any others and believe me they're motivated. It reminds me of when Reagan took the Linda Taylor story, a sociopath if there ever was one, and convinced millions of Americans that poor people were like that. One sensational anecdote against the larger data and evidence. If they did have legitimate examples supporting their arguments, now would be the time to bring them out, when you have women going septic and almost dying, women forced to be walking coffins for babies that are going to die a painful death after birth, and so many more.
If there's no law against third term abortions does Gosnell go to prison? Yes or no?
Yes. There's more than enough medical malpractice there. That's the reason for the safe in safe and legal. And delivering an infant and killing it is not what an abortion is, despite what Donald Trump says. Legitimate doctors are not going to terminate a pregnancy that would be viable outside the uterus because it's less complicated to just do a c-section. Unless in some specific case it's impossible to both save the pregnant person and deliver. That's why doctors should be making these decisions. I understand there was a case where George Tiller performed a late procedure on a 10-year old patient which was controversial, but I don't know of any other examples, and anti-abortion has all the motivation in the world to find them. In cases in which advanced care is needed, there are a handful of practitioners in places like Colorado and Maryland who are qualified to treat these patients. Again I don't have specifics on Gosnell's patients, but if they had seen a reputable OBGYN at any point in their pregnancy they shouldn't have ended up there. Providing good reproductive health care to women both before and throughout pregnancy will reduce the instances of tragedy. An OBGYN can answer these questions better and with much more specificity than I can. No one is arguing in favor of medical malpractice.
So it is not true that an abortion prevents a very specific and unduplicateable human being from being born?
I'm not anti-abortion but I don't deny that yeah, you're killing someone. Just someone I consider less important than me.
In the same way that masturbating into a toilet kills millions...
Every sperm is sacred. Actually sperm are individual single cell lives, but what you described does not significantly reduce their life-spans.
Two sides journalism is still prevalent, but has declined with the rise of analysis (e.g. infused with the reporter's opinion) journalism. The recent James Bennnet essay on his time at NYT speaks to this.
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
One of the best essays published last year anywhere.
"The Big Cope as the belief that Democrats would win every competitive election if only it weren’t for unfair media coverage."
I don't know what world you're living in Nate, but The Big Cope sounds like a larger Republicans symptom. A victimization mentality has infected the GOP on nearly every level.
Blaming the media is a dumb argument from both sides, while occasionally being true. It's like complaining about the refs in sports: they are often awful, occasionally relevant and rarely pivotal. Most of the time you lose based on your performance and strategy but the refs/media.
Source?
Pick a speech, any speech from the former President and head of the Republican party.
When Trump ran for the GOP nomination in 2016, he was only one of 17 candidates.
The mainstream media gave him more than TWICE the coverage it gave the other 16 candidates COMBINED. Then it marveled at how unstoppable he was!
They didn’t just put their thumb on the scale, the jumped on with both ass cheeks while they bounced up and down.
HRC was oblivious in a bubble of her yes-underlings, ignoring the alarm bells going off in MI, PA and WI for months. Late in October she was balking at making appearances in MI and WI because Obama had made those Blue States. If she made appearances there the media might pounce on her and say in was a sign of weakness. You know what else is a sign of weakness? Losing those states on Election Day!
This partisan media climate excels at jacking up negatives of the opposing candidate. So being underestimated is an advantage because the partisan media will focus on a different candidate and jack up their negatives. Obama and Trump and Biden were all underestimated and ended up as president. Hillary should never have been the nominee and Democrats should have had competitive nominating process to select a candidate.
As a Gen Zer, it seems remarkably obvious that if the Democrats stopped whining about the media and just did their best to actually deliver on the promises they made to my generation to get us to vote for them, they wouldn't have to worry about coverage favorable or unfavorable. But alas they have taken the Republican strategy of just shouting 'fake news' and saying 'the other party is worse' when confronted about their failures. The DNC will blame EVERYONE else but Biden if Biden loses in November, and it's so obvious to anyone with a brain.
How can they deliver when Republicans in Congress blocks everything (especially popular policies), from border control measures to Ukraine funding to infrastructure spending to bank regulations?
maybe they should've thought of that back in 2020...
Out of curiosity which promises are you referring to? There has been a pretty good faith effort to deliver on most campaign promises from 2020 out of the Biden team. And a frankly impressive retinue of passed legislation the likes we haven't seen from a president and congress in a LONG time.
If your complaint is that it should happen faster, well then you're just kind of ignorant of how our political process works.
Biden promised legal weed, cancellation of *most* student debt, $2,000 stimulus checks, an end to the fascist threat posed by Trump, the ability to work across the aisle and be the "bipartisan" candidate, and a widespread COVID vaccine rollout. Out of all that, we got... the vaccine rollout. No marijuana legalization, only 7% of student debt cancelled, no $2k stimulus checks even with a senate majority, and Trump now poses a greater threat to America than ever before. The climate plan also got turned into a bunch of "carrots" (incentives that companies can choose to take advantage of) rather than "sticks" (hard regulation that forces companies make green changes) and the Biden admin has actively bypassed congress to send weapons to fund an ethnostate's military campaign against civilians. But hey, the stock market is at an all-time high and the rich are getting richer than ever before, so what's there to complain about? At least he fulfilled his promise that "nothing significant will change" while he was in office...
* "Biden promised legal weed" Weed requires law changes that a fractured congress won't do, but this is in progress which is something: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/26/biden-change-marijuana-restriction-federal-illegal
* "cancellation of *most* student debt" He doesn't have the authority to do that as shown by the conservative supreme court shutting down his modest attempts so far. Can't say he didn't try, not going to pass in a contested congress.
* "an end to the fascist threat posed by Trump", Trump's not president anymore and being prosecuted in a variety of cases. What more do you want? The justice system turns slowly (and for good reason).
* "the ability to work across the aisle and be the "bipartisan" candidate" Biden has passed a HUGE amount of bipartisan legislation. Like historically it's really really impressive what he has accomplished with a divided congress.
* "The climate plan also got turned into a bunch of "carrots"" , You request bipartisan legislation then get upset that bipartisan legislation is basically, "Shit everyone can agree on, aka carrots"?
* "Biden admin has actively bypassed congress to send weapons to fund an ethnostate's military campaign against civilians". This is probably the most legit complaint in your list.
The president isn't a dictator. If you think he can wave his hand and make all this stuff happen you're naive. He's made good faith efforts on all of these to the extent that he has the authority.
Frankly it sounds like your complaint is that politician's should add a bunch of caveats about congress and the reality of passing laws to their political stump speeches/goals. Which is just kind of silly. Give Biden a 60 vote super majority in the senate and you'll really start to see the legislative progress you desire, otherwise you're going to have to be content with the bipartisan stuff and put the blame where it really belongs.
As with any other liberal, all you can do is provide a bunch of weak excuses for Biden's failings and no actual arguments for him. Try again, this deflecting of responsibility that his administration is so brilliant at doing is why he has a sub-40% approval rating.
I find it exceptionally dense that you call the IRA "bipartisan legislation" when quite literally every Republican in congress voted against it. You walked face first into the point and missed it, my complaint was that Biden said he was the "bipartisan" candidate and then had to pass all major bills on party lines, so if every member of the opposition refuses to be appeased by carrots then bring out the sticks for Christ's sake.
"Give Biden a 60 vote super majority in the Senate"
...have you seen the 2024 Senate map? If a Senate majority is what you want, might as well hope Trump wins in 2024 so we get another blue tidal wave in 2026 similar to 2028. The deck is stacked so absurdly in favor of Republicans for at least the next 10 years when it comes to Senate seats that a weak Dem in the White House is the only nail needed in the coffin for a Blue senate.
If Biden loses, and he very well might, it will be because he has completely failed to project a persona of "strength" and really just a failure to inspire any sort confidence in anybody my age that he can actually change things. If the solution is to have more Dems in Congress, Trump being in office would actually be better for accomplishing that goal. Red or Blue, the extraction of profit from the lower class to be accumulated in exorbitant amounts by the wealthy will not stop. As a leftist, why would I vote for either candidate when they're both self-declared capitalists? My only goal is the downfall of American capitalism, so wouldn't the better option be the guy who will accelerate it's internal contradictions and inevitable decline rather than the one flailing to keep it barely afloat?
The other party and the constitution - the system they are required to govern under - are the source of their failures. If the Democrats lose in November, the party will become irrelevant. There will be only the ruling regime and whoever becomes the most effective resistance to it, and anyone capable of losing this election won't qualify.
Hi Nate, I've long loved your work and own the Signal and the Noise, but I'm commenting for the first time because I need to express that this piece is perhaps the weakest of yours I've read - it does not have the rigor youre known for. I'm admittedly on the liberal side, but my points are valid nonetheless. You may be right or wrong, but your thinking here is not consistent; indeed, it seems you began with a premise and worked backwards to try to justify it:
1. By your own source, Hunter was not censored by the Indigo blob, the story had only limited censoring on Facebook;
2. Discussing "Cancel Culture" at all is not a strong decision - there are MANY definitions (are angry tweets being "cancelled"? A Nazi not being allowed to speak at a college? Someone being rightfully fired for sexual impropriety at work?);
3. Implying cancel culture is solely a liberal issue here is disingenuous - while yes, the right has pinned it on them, the right utilizes it equally as much (coffee cups, kneeling and the NFL, book banning/author cancelling, Disney, Bud Light, Taylor Swift, etc.);
4. Your Memeoradnum "data" is almost irrelevant - saying that the top news story is about a literal war instead of, say, Kevin Hart not being allowed to present an awards show because of "cancel culture" is a wildly inconsistent way to try to prove a paper is overly liberal - Hart should never be the top story over a war but who knows, he may very well be, say, the second story;
5. Similarly, Biden's age - yes he's old, but Trump is nearly indistinguishably old, and neither is a "breaking" story, so why would either either be a top news story when there's nothing new to report?
6. We dont know if deplatforming Trump on Twitter "worked" (depending on how you define worked), but it surely minimized his reach, and your "data" simply showing approval ratings is, frankly, poor journalism and worse science. We all know what confounders are, and approval ratings would require a novel to list out them all out;
7. "There is a lot of Trump coverage in the mainstream media. A lot, most of it quite negative." Yes, he has 91 criminal charges and started an insurrection! This is extremely odd - even highly biased - phrasing for you to use given that context;
8. Lastly, I think the very premise of the "The Big Cope" is a straw man - very few people think that simple unbalanced media coverage across the board is the problem, but instead, it's the more nuanced idea that a subsection of people are wrapped tightly in an impenetrable bubble of disinformation via Fox, Facebook/Twitter, OAN/Newsmax, Joe Rogan, etc.
The issue is NOT "are mainstream newspapers slightly left of center," but :
a) the extreme amount of censoring and outright mis/disinformation on rightwing outlets(and evidence against an incorrect belief heard once takes roughly 6 instances of being refuted to be updated in one's head, so there is an imbalance); paired with
b) the fact that many people get their news SOLELY from those sources. (While liberals may be in a bubble, as well, I'd argue it's far less intense, as, e.g., the NYTimes is nowhere near as extreme as those rightwing sources, and the bubble still receives far-right ideas via Facebook, Twitter, from Trump/MTG/Boebert/etc., and opinion pieces.) If these widely held beliefs are wrong, that would be a great piece for you to write! Also: will you write a similar article assessing how the Trump indictments have been (not) covered by the "Maroon Blob"?
Nate, in general, I love your work and visited 538 nearly daily when you were there. Truly great stuff. But this piece shows a lack of attention to detail, a use of incomplete data to justify an idea you'd previously developed, and a very weak use of data. You have reach and power to influence people, so please, continue to provide criticism of both sides, but use it wisely: it must be stronger than this! Looking forward to it
If Reviewer 2 actually gave comments this constructive and polite, it wouldn't be a meme :)
Great article but I have to quibble with you regurgitating the Dem talking points on the border bill failure. The GOP demanded we close the border, this bill doesn't even come close to doing that. Whether or not Trump said anything about it this would still be the case and it still wouldn't have the votes. They want their Ukraine forever war funding? Attach it to HR2 and watch the law get approved quickly. Hell, Trump would probably come out and support it. A huge win for everyone except those who want to keep importing illegals for whatever purpose.
I think that the methodology here is flawed: the vast majority of people do not read the NY Times on paper or by going to the website. They click through from a link to a specific article that is shared on social media, usually not by someone that the NY Times has any influence over.
The only scale that the NY Times can put its finger on is the absolute number of articles published on a particular story. It doesn't matter if they're A1-above-the-fold, because there is no fold and no A1 any more. They can't bury a story any more other than by not publishing it at all.
And I think there is a fair criticism that - because conservatives are much better at sticking to a single story and finding new angles on it - a single story will generate more articles than a typical liberal narrative. And if you take the position that 50 articles running on one story, which reinforce each other, are more effective than many hundreds of articles each being the only article on a different story (which is, at least, a plausible position), then I can see a case for saying that the NY Times' news judgement is biased in a conservative direction. This is the "have you written the same story 100 times? Only then have you written the story at all" position.
That would imply that the NY Times should maintain a leaderboard (internally) on how many articles it has run on each story and question whether that aligns with its internal perception of the importance of the stories. I don't think you could operate a newsroom like that, but it's not wholly impossible.
But I think there's another factor. It's not even the number of stories, it's the ones that go viral. And one thing that will consistently help NY Times stories go viral is being elevated by conservatives, because to a conservative the fact that "even the liberal" NY Times is running a story elevates it to something real and not just a conservative-media-only story, and thus makes it more convincing. The NY Times running a story that conforms to a liberal narrative is expected and therefore gains little or no traction for the fact the NY Times ran it, even from liberals. It has to get traction for just the content of the story.
The problem, for liberals, is that there are very few examples of "even the conservative" Fox News running a story that conforms to a liberal narrative and lots of examples of the NY Times conforming to a conservative narrative. That means that they can't respond in kind.
But, if you write that out as a prescription, unlike the "leaderboard of stories", it calls for the NY Times to refuse to run any story that can be used by a conservative to reinforce a conservative narrative. This is absolutely a demand for the Times to be ideologically disciplined as liberal media. It's an "if a GOP representative tweets out a story we ran, we should pull the story and be ashamed of that fact" position. And when you actually write that as a specific demand, it's instantly apparent why the NY Times is never going to do that.
Liberals try to be fair; conservatives don't. And that's why conservatives win. We are not equipped in this country to handle the monster they have created.
Nice bait and switch. First paragraphs had me going there, Nate. But immediately after that it was punch left as always.
Never change, man, never change.
Nate Silver write a political Substack post framed as "both sides" that spends more time criticizing the right than the left challenge (impossible)
I'm inclined to agree on personal bias, I'm not sure the Memeorandom an NYT listings are persuasive if it's just listing the most important story. It could still be that these topics get too much currency in their zone of importance. A topic like "cancel culture" was unlikely to ever make the front page of the NYT without a specific scandal being national newsworthy.
Wow! Reading the comments, y'all are batshit crazy.
Welcome to Substack comments.
To claim that Trump catalyzed a populist reaction in the US is to ignore Brexit, Boris Johnson, Urban, Duterte, Bolsonaro and more recently Wilders and Milei.
Given the plethora of examples from abroad I think it's more technically correct to say that Trump is the American expression of a populist movement that is sweeping the planet. There are other important dimensions (the gender divide in Western Europe with men trending conservative while women trend liberal, for example) that the rest of the world shares with the United States.
Americans have rejected neoliberalism and Americans have rejected neoconservatism…and after Matrix Resurrection Americans have even rejected Neo!!