What kind of bullshit is this?
Imagine a world where most enthusiasts went into each football Sunday on the wrong impression about which team was in first place, and came out of each football Sunday with the wrong impression which teams won and what the scores were. People aren’t that clueless. Such a scenario would require intentional mass deception, from the people in that arena who are trusted the most. ESPN would pretty much have to be putting misleading graphics and scoreboards on the air all day in order to trick people into believing false things about the standings. It would never happen, and if it did, no one would ever stand for it.
That’s why I’m so often perplexed about how it’s possible that most political enthusiasts have a factually false impression of what’s going on in politics most of the time. This kind of thing just doesn’t exist in any other walk of life. That’s because the political media and pundit class really does engage in intentional mass deception on a regular – frankly daily – basis. And it’s not just the worst people in the industry; it’s the norm.
Case in point. The New Yorker published an article on Monday titled “Joe Biden’s Last Campaign.” Okay, so be it. Biden is term limited, and this is the end of the road for him. But then came the lede: “Trailing Trump in the polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reelection.” Where do we even start with this bullshit?
First, Biden isn’t behind in the polls. Biden and Trump are statistically tied in the polling averages. In fact, on the same day that The New Yorker published this article, two new polls were released. They both had Biden ahead of Trump. Oops.
At this early stage of the game it’s generally a good idea to ignore the polls, because general election polls never do seem to make any sense during primary season. The first meaningful poll will be after both conventions have taken place. But while the polls have their problems, particularly this early on, the media is lying about what the polls are even saying. If the media believed in the polls, then the media would be telling you about all of the polls, not just the specific polls that fit a certain narrative. The media’s misreporting of the polls is not a problem with the polls. It’s a problem with the media.
Then there’s the claim that Biden is “facing doubts about his age.” Huh? Biden and Trump are basically the same age. In terms of age they’re just 5% apart from each other. So if the media is saying that the public has doubts about Biden’s age but not about Trump’s age, then the media is admitting it’s been trying to trick the public when it comes to the ages of these two men. Because realistically speaking, they’re the same age.
Then there’s the laugh out loud absurd notion that Joe Biden has “defiant confidence” that he just might win. Again, huh? Biden has the incumbency advantage, he has a booming economy at his back, his numbers are trending in the right direction, he’s utterly dominating his party’s primary race, and his party has overperformed in every election for the past three years. Biden’s opponent is showing severe and worsening signs of dementia, and his first of four criminal trials begins in three weeks.
Of course Biden thinks he’s going to win. Anyone who’s paying accurate attention to what’s going on thinks Biden is far more likely to win than Trump. But again, how can anyone pay accurate attention to what’s going on, when the media keeps actively misleading everyone about what the polls say, what the ages of the candidates are, and what the overall situation is?
And so we end up with The New Yorker portraying Biden as a severe underdog who still thinks he just might have a chance. Keep in mind that while The New Yorker is pretty much a shitpile of a publication that’s no better or worse than most other major political news outlets. This is simply the misleading garbage that the entire political media and pundit class feeds us on a regular basis.
This is, after all, the same political media that kept trying to convince us Trump would never be indicted, even once it became clear that grand juries were deep into the process of indicting him. This is the same political media that’s now trying to convince us Trump’s criminal trials will never happen, even though one of them is beginning in just three weeks. This is the same political media that tried to convince us Hillary Clinton was in legal trouble for her emails. Remember, these stories aren’t aberrations. They’re the norm. We put up with the political media trying to steer us in the wrong direction, in the name of chasing ratings, pretty much every single day.
It’s not enough to call out one misleading headline at a time, or label one publication or author or TV host at a time as being “bad.” There are worse offenders than others, but this is not an individual problem. It is the norm. The political media spends every day telling us the wrong scores, the wrong teams, and the wrong standings. Then when the obvious thing happens that was always on track to happen, they try to spin it as some shocking surprise that no one could have seen coming. This won’t stop until we finally put our foot down on an industry wide basis.
