The corporate press misses Trump's daily circus.
How reluctant was the press to sing Biden’s praise on Friday? Both “ABC World News Tonight” and “NBC Nightly News” ignored the stunning October jobs report. “Nightly News” though, did find time to report on Biden’s “plummeting” approval rating Friday night.
In the middle of the afternoon on Friday, news consumers visiting WashingtonPost.com had to scroll down past 75 different stories and links before they found the first mention of the blockbuster jobs report. Ironically, at the top of the Post site Friday afternoon was a column about how the White House is having trouble spreading good news about the economy. Over at CNN.com, readers at the “US” homepage had to scroll past 70 stories before seeing the first jobs headline.
Saturday’s front page of the New York Times announced the passage of the infrastructure bill, but stressed in the headline that Democrats were still “haggling” over the Build Back Better social spending bill. Just in case readers didn’t pick up on the pessimistic framing, the Times ran an accompanying report about how America feels “gloomy” under Biden.
Sunday’s Washington Post reported on how Biden “finally” had some good news to tout. But most of the Post article retraced how difficult it had been for Biden to get the infrastructure bill passed, while detailing Biden’s “yelling has become more frequent and directed at a wider audience of staff.” Imagine what the Post coverage would have looked like if the infrastructure bill had been voted down.
This is what happens when the press becomes wed to a gotcha storyline. The doomsday narrative took hold in August when the U.S. troop pullout in Afghanistan exploded into a weeks-long story, and was covered almost universally as a cataclysmic failure, even though the Biden administration not only ended the Forever War for America, but oversaw the largest, most efficient wartime evacuation in history, spiriting 120,000 Afghans out of the country. Nonetheless, the press was sure it was the White House’s “summer from hell” and that Biden was in a political “free fall.”
