Media coverage responsible for Biden's bad poll numbers, says Washington Post op-ed writer

This column by Perry Bacon of the Washington Post blaming media coverage of the Biden administration for the president’s awful poll numbers reminds me of the following very old joke: The acoustics at the Senate are terrible — you can hear every word the Senators say.

Unlike Senate acoustics, the mainstream media does some screening. It doesn’t report every silly word Joe Biden utters or all of his failed policies. But it reports enough for the public to get the general idea. Blaming the media for the public’s perceptions of the president is like blaming good acoustics.

Even a media blackout wouldn’t help Biden. The public knows without being informed by reporters that Biden failed to meet its expectations on ending the pandemic; that some things it needs to buy aren’t available for purchase; and that inflation is rampant.

Biden’s failures and inadequacies are more than sufficient to explain why Americans take such a dim view of his performance. There was the chaotic, deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan — a national humiliation unmatched since Vietnam. There are the large number of covid deaths, more than half a million of them since Biden took over after promising to get the virus under control.

There is inflation the likes of which we haven’t seen in four decades. Biden had assured Americans that inflation wouldn’t be much of a problem. And when inflation surged, his top aide called it a “high class problem.”

There is the supply chain crisis — something I can’t recall America experiencing in my six decades of paying attention to public affairs.

Crime continues to surge to the point that even liberals in my upscale neighborhood are worried about it. Their fears aren’t based on what they read in the papers or see on television. They are based on what they tell each other on community email chains and chat groups about break-ins, carjackings, and other local crime.

Illegal immigration has also surged. Biden’s performance on this front is a disgrace.

In addition, Biden has failed to meet the expectations of his core supporters. Think about his incredible shrinking Build Back Better legislation which apparently cannot be passed even in stripped down form. If you believe climate change is an “existential threat,” you can’t be happy with Joe Biden.

And let’s not forget about Biden himself. At times, he looks feeble. He can avoid gaffes only by reading prepared statements, which he struggles to get through with any semblance of fluency.

The acoustics in his public appearances are terrible. You can hear every stumble he makes.

Bacon’s column is so silly that even Oliver Knox, his colleague at the Post, has balked. (See also this rebuttal of Bacon by Charlie Sykes.) Knox focuses on disputing Bacon’s claim that “what caused Biden’s dip [in the polls] was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — or, rather, the media’s 24/7, highly negative coverage of it.”

Media coverage of this disaster could not rationally have been other than “highly negative.” Nor could it reasonably have been other than persistent, which is Bacon’s main complaint. As Knox notes:

The administration’s day-to-day inability or unwillingness to say how many Americans had been evacuated, and how many remained on the ground, didn’t exactly project an image of unimpeachable competence. Nor did leaving behind Afghans who aided the war effort.

But Knox’s primary objection to Bacon’s piece is that he attributes too much of Biden’s slide to Afghanistan. He writes:

Let’s look at summer 2021 more broadly in terms of what Americans were seeing and reading.

At CNN, Betsy Klein had this rundown: The withdrawal, yes. But also “surging cases, hospitalizations and deaths driven by the Delta variant” of the coronavirus. Solid job growth but worrisome inflation numbers. Supply chain problems. Democratic infighting over Biden’s domestic agenda (infighting the White House would later blame for hurting the president’s standing!). And a sharp rise in migrants attempting to cross the southern border, including “the highest monthly number of migrants detained at the US-Mexico border in two decades.”

So covid was raging and the economy wasn’t back to normal, confounding two of Biden’s core campaign promises, and there were many other issues.

If these problems had cleared up, Biden’s standing would have improved, Afghanistan notwithstanding. Instead, most of them persisted, some got worse, and new ones emerged.

Bacon came to the Washington Post from FiveThirtyEight (he was an odd choice for the Post to snap up, I thought, since his commentary consistently struck me as some of the weakest at that site). FiveThirtyEight prides itself on using statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about politics, among other things.

Yet, Bacon’s column is devoid of hard numbers, or any other kind of evidence, that support his central claims. He asserts without evidence that journalists were “desperate to find a big anti-Biden story.”

He claims without evidence that the media has a bias towards “bothsideism” — a desire not to tilt coverage in favor of one party or ideology. From this unsupported (and in my view unsupportable) premise, he goes so far as to say, again without evidence, that some journalists wanted to balance their negative treatment of Donald Trump with criticism of Joe Biden, regardless of what Biden did.

Accordingly, says Bacon, the media was “hunting” for an anti-Biden story and finally found one in the Afghanistan debacle. But we’ve already seen from Knox that there were plenty of other developments over which to criticize Biden by that time. There was no need to hunt for any more, and it certainly required no hunting to find the Afghanistan story. As pro-Democrat as it is (only seven percent of reporters identified as Republicans in a 2014 survey), the media could hardly have missed the Afghanistan fiasco or reported on it without making Biden look terrible.

But Bacon isn’t writing for FiveThirtyEight any longer. He’s with the Washington Post now, so who needs evidence?

Indeed, the Post might have been doing more than just advancing “equity” when it hired Bacon, an African-American. Maybe it was “hunting” for the kind of columnist who wouldn’t be embarrassed to write an absurd apology for Biden and to attack the mainstream media for being too unkind to his administration.

Bacon must have exceeded the Post’s wildest expectations with this opening sentence to his final paragraph:

It’s too early to say whether Biden is a great or even good president.

Joe Biden a great president? We’re nearly 40 percent into what’s likely to be the Biden presidency, and America has thoroughly rejected that notion. For good reason and without assistance from the mainstream media.