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A Familiar Media Failure
There are only two parties, and only one election; legacy media is once again creating false impressions about the stakes; Democrats once again aren't helping their own cause.
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Wherever you fall on the question of whether Abdul El-Sayed should have campaigned with Hasan Piker, you should be able to agree with this much: The mainstream media’s obsession with that particular association represents a big, sadly familiar vocational failure.
You should also be able to agree with this: The failure is more stark than it might otherwise be, because most high-profile Democrats do not try to make controversy out of the company Republicans keep. We know they could do this, because when Jon Ossoff did it earlier this month it kicked off a multiday, still-unfolding media feeding frenzy, and did real damage to Donald Trump.
As I always say, our political press corps should be better than it is; but until it heals itself, Democrats need to optimize communication for the media we have.
What’s the vocational failure?
Simple: It’s selective memory about the fact that, in the United States, we have two major political parties, and one election. This alone discredits the idea that “balance” should be any outlet’s north star—at least insofar as journalists also believe their role is to help inform the citizenry. Gotta choose one! Depict the parties as they are, or fabricate “balance” and misinform the citizenry.
To the extent that journalists do view it as their role to inform the citizenry, this includes more than just ensuring that what they report is true. It also includes conveying information in a manner that fosters accurate impressions about similarities and differences between the parties. The text and presentation of political news coverage (column inches, air time, headlines, tone, etc) should leave regular and casual consumers with a correct sense of things. Which candidate or party is the more ethical? The more extreme? The more substantive? The more honest? Etc.
The canonical failure here came in 2016, when the legacy media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails created the false impression that, between her and Donald Trump, she was most corrupt. More scandal plagued. Less trustworthy. It almost certainly cost her the election. It may yet cost us constitutional democracy.
The singular obsession with El-Sayed and Piker is the same thing. In isolation, a reasonable point of scrutiny, just as Clinton’s emails were fair game. Nobody honest would argue the media has some obligation to ignore these questions altogether in order to create the “correct” impression: Do the things Piker has said suggest he’s an antisemite? Should someone who wants to be a senator align with someone so controversial? Someone who, whatever you think of them, holds fairly extreme views?
In totality, though, what they’ve done is create a false impression: that there’s only one Senate candidate in either party who has an association so troubling that every other candidate in his party should have to answer for it. That the El-Sayed/Piker relationship is so aberrant, the midterm should be, at least in part, a referendum on this relationship.
Sorry, it’s bullshit.
I won’t recite the whole litany, because it would run hundreds if not thousands of words. But the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia has employed multiple white supremacists. The Republican Senate candidate in Texas is himself a fraud, impeached by his own party for corruption, bribery, and abuse of power. There are scores of white supremacists and neo-Nazis working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, many of them unnamed, because the press corps has decided this isn’t terribly interesting. The fanatical right-wing commentator Rod Dreher, whose standards aren’t so high that he didn’t spend years working for Viktor Orban, recently reported with alarm that perhaps 30 to 40 percent of young Republican staffers in Washington are groypers. The president’s most loyal sidekick (not Natalie, the other one) is a vile bigot. Here she is just yesterday calling four prominent Democratic women and a sitting Supreme Court justice, “ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black BITCHES.” And the rest of the Republican surrogate class is teeming with fascists, conspiracy theorists, people on the take from foreign governments.
It’s a sewer. What do Mike Rogers and the rest of this cycle’s Republican candidate class think of these associations? It’s unclear they’ll be asked, let alone hounded.
I don’t need mainstream media elites to call the GOP elite a sewer. But I do expect them to make this contrast clear to voters. They are currently inverting reality, at least at the level of first impression.