The one thing Joe Biden has to worry about right now
In a perfect world, the media would give equal time to both candidates, and cover them each in fair and honest fashion. But we all know that’s not a real thing. The reality is that major media outlets are for-profit corporate entities, and one way or the other, they’re going to find a way to get the ratings and page views they need out of this election. This brings us to Joe Biden.
The latest polling averages show Joe Biden dominating in the swing states, and opening up laughably large leads in slightly blue states. One new poll has Biden up by an insane eighteen points in Colorado, a state where you might normally expect the democratic presidential candidate to win by four or five points. There’s not yet enough polling in a place like Colorado to know if that poll is an outlier. But the point is that this election is swiftly trending toward non-competitive territory – and that’s what Biden has to worry about.
The media is going to get its ratings out of this election one way or the other. Competitive elections are, by default, far better for ratings than blowouts are. Joe Biden has to worry that if he opens up too big of a lead, the media will decide that it has to find a way to make this a competitive race. We saw the media do this to Hillary Clinton by endlessly promoting a phony email scandal, until it eroded what had been a sizable lead for her. It’s not that the media wanted Hillary to lose. The media just wanted it to be close, so ratings would remain high; Hillary actually losing over a fake scandal was just everyone’s bad luck.
This time around the media can’t seem to decide how it wants to handle this. We saw MSNBC try to make the election more of a horse race last week by breathlessly promoting an obviously phony Joe Biden scandal, only to learn the hard way that people aren’t in the mood for that kind of crap this time around. The media now sees that it will have to be careful about hyping phony Biden scandals, for fear of audience blowback. And yet it still has to find a way to get ratings out of this election cycle.
One saving grace is that Donald Trump is – increasingly to his detriment – a one man ratings factory. Each time he holds a disastrous press conference, or gives an embarrassing interview, or has a late night Twitter meltdown, he ensures that the next media cycle will be all about him. Of course this coverage ends up being mostly negative, and further hurts his election prospects. But telling a narcissist to stop seeking attention is like telling an addict to stop seeking a drug, so Trump will keep doing this, even as his handlers try to explain to him that it’s not helping him.
So long as Donald Trump’s ongoing implosion continues to give the media the ratings-friendly news cycles that it needs, the media may be less inclined to consider promoting phony Biden scandals in order to supplement its ratings. The one thing Joe Biden has to worry about is the scenario where Trump finally shuts up for awhile, and the media has to look elsewhere for ratings, and decides it needs to do something about Biden’s troublingly large lead.
