Dan Froomkin writes at Press Watch about the media’s latest failure to do its job and open the window to see if it is raining outside when providing analysis of President Biden’s latest speech about the threat MAGA Republicanism poses to our democracy.
Well before the actual speech, it was clear that Biden’s sounding of the alarm for American democracy would also be an implicit reproach of the mainstream media, for its failure to do so.
So instead of directly addressing the substance of his speech, our elite political reporters stuck to their way of doing things: They marginalized any mention of the threat to democracy as a purely partisan attack (political, yes, partisan, no); they cast the speech as a tired campaign move (see, e.g., Peter Baker); they raised quibbles about the optics (see, e.g., Brianna Keilar. They also downplayed it, like it didn’t really matter.
Whether the nation heard what Biden was saying has yet to be seen. But the nation’s most influential political reporters couldn’t hear it – they literally could not take it in — because it would have meant acknowledging how far from truth-telling they have fallen.