The Tedious Media Blame Game

Left-leaning critics need to stop pointing fingers at the mainstream media for Biden's political struggles and setbacks

People walk past the New York Times headquarters on 8th Avenue on May 16, 2024, in New York City. (Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

Dear Readers,

Remember when I announced a couple of weeks ago that I’d be going on a much-needed family vacation and so would only be posting one item per week for the next two weeks? Well, that vacation never happened. It had to be canceled last minute because my beloved 89-year-old mother-in-law injured herself in a fall a few days before we were scheduled to depart, and her condition rapidly deteriorated thereafter. She died on May 23. The past 2+ weeks have been spent traveling back and forth to Ohio, and we’ll be doing it again this week for calling hours and a funeral this Tuesday and Wednesday.

What this means is that this will be my only post this week. I hope to be back next week with my usual two. But I also hope to reschedule for later this spring or summer the family trip that had to be scuttled. I trust you’ll understand if posting is again sparser than usual during that upcoming vacation. —DL

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I’m here to tell you that, if Donald Trump manages to win the 2024 presidential election, a number of influential political analysts will blame the outcome on the New York Times.

I spend a lot of time observing how my fellow pundits think. And the fact is that a not-insignificant number of left-leaning writers respond to bad political news by turning immediately to media criticism. Yes, they loathe Trump and the rest of his party. But not like they despise their ostensible allies in the mainstream media for failing to praise with sufficient fervor Joe Biden’s many accomplishments and to pronounce with sufficient harshness on the former president in every related story they publish.

The outlook underlying this line of criticism is clear: The media critics assume that the Republican would obviously and decisively be losing were it not for overly negative coverage of the president and wishy-washy, uncritical reporting on Trump from the mainstream press. President Joe Biden, his campaign, and his party aren’t the problem. And neither, really, is Trump himself, whose awfulness is self-evident. The problem is the media, for laundering the former president’s authoritarian bigotry, transforming from him and his right-wing, antidemocratic movement into a perfectly normal presidential campaign, while continually highlighting Biden’s struggles. If only the media did its job by conveying Biden’s strengths while emphasizing Trump’s terribleness to the voters in truthful, unambiguous terms, the Democrat would be on a certain path to victory.

I think this outlook and mode of analysis is quite wrong—and that its persistence eight years into the Trump era is a distressing sign that a number of influential left-leaning intellectuals fail to understand certain key things about our political and cultural situation.

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