Biden, a new covid victim himself, is now saddled with a crisis that seems endless-and is not his doing. But the covid crisis undoubtedly thickens the political gloom and shortens tempers about the administration’s failure to end the pandemic. This all started under Trump, let us remember. It is painfully obvious that many serious problems confront the American people, but, press coverage notwithstanding, not all of these are Biden’s fault.įor example, the seemingly nonstop, disruptive surges of covid variants could have erupted under any president. Negativity sold then, and it does now but now it is technologically empowered by social media and looser journalistic standards that make governing a democracy a minute-to-minute firecracker of a challenge.īy living on negativity, the press has only compounded the inherent problems of governing a democracy already spinning out of control. I had a much better chance of getting my story on the evening news if I was reporting an administration disaster than if I wanted to report a success. My own experience as a journalist for more than three decades corroborates Patterson’s research. Harvard’s Professor Thomas Patterson, in numerous studies, has often pointed to a “negative bias” in the media-“a tendency,” he told me, “to focus on what’s going poorly or done poorly as opposed to what’s going well and done well.” Or, as the old saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” What we have all noticed is that as Biden’s poll numbers collapsed, negative coverage of him rose, leading in turn to still lower poll numbers, which have only further darkened his political prospects, a looping interaction between polling and press negativity from which there seems no escape. Since then, they’ve dropped even further, dangling now in the mid-30’s. For a few weeks, news stories from the Kabul airport were devastatingly critical of Biden’s decision, and by month’s end, his poll numbers had dropped to 50%. But, as we know, Biden’s poll numbers dropped dramatically after he made the controversial decision in August, 2021, to withdraw the last contingent of American forces from Afghanistan under conditions that were, to say the least, challenging. Some journalists were willing to give the new president the benefit of the doubt on controversial issues. His approval rating was a respectable 55%. Still, Biden survived his first few months in office in reasonably good shape. Granted, the press is ordinarily skeptical of any incoming president, but Biden was never given much of a honeymoon. But can the press do better?Īccording to columnist Perry Bacon Jr.’s analysis of the media’s cutting criticism of Biden, journalists seemed “poised” from Day One of his administration to “balance” their justifiably negative coverage of Trump with a run of unjustifiably negative stories about Biden. Is that a fair and balanced image of Biden? Hardly. The press image of Biden, president of the United States of America, has been whittled down to that of a doddering old man, wobbly on his feet and barely able to articulate a single thought without slurring. Not only does criticism not come in equal shapes and sizes, appropriate for all presidents and both political parties (a journalistic curse called “bothsideism”), but, when unfairly applied, as it has been in covering Biden, it runs the serious risk of further damaging our still free press and weakening our already shaky democracy. If it strongly criticized Donald Trump during his presidency (and since), then it follows that it must also strongly criticize Joe Biden, which is exactly what it’s done. The American press corps struggles every day to prove to readers and viewers that it is “fair and balanced,” the slogan cleverly adopted by Fox News.
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