I grew bored years ago with the readers who relentlessly whine about the so-called “liberal media.” Has there ever been a lazier knee-jerk stereotype?
Those who continue to mouth that mantra should reassess their habit in light of the “liberal media’s” beatdown of Joe Biden. The Washington Post is hammering him for a “chaotic and deadly” withdrawal from Afghanistan. Chuck Todd of NBC News says it will “haunt Mr. Biden’s legacy.” Mike Allen, the Washington media tastemaker at Axios, calls it “Biden’s stain.” The New York Times is questioning Biden’s “competence,” and comparing the pullout to the last days of the Vietnam War. Jonathan Karl of ABC News gives Liz Cheney a platform to savage Biden for the pullout – without once reminding Liz that her father was an architect of the lie-fueled Iraq invasion that diverted key resources from Afghanistan, thus triggering our problems there in the first place. Indeed, it’s impossible to watch the Sunday talk shows are find a single guest who wasn’t an Afghanistan war enabler back in the day.
If the “liberal media” was really ideologically liberal and committed to defending Democrats at all costs, it would not have spent the last week savaging the Democratic president. Right now, in fact, it remains so locked into the “disaster” narrative that you’d barely know that thus far 60,000 people have been evacuated without a single American military or civilian casualty.
Why have so many reporters and analysts in the Washington-based “liberal media” been so tough on Biden, confounding the stereotype that conservatives hold so dear? Several overlapping reasons:
(1) After being tough on Donald Trump (as was necessary, given his myriad pathologies), they want to bend over backwards to show they’re not in the tank for Biden, (2) they tend to favor establishment Washington sources, many of whom, in the case of Afghanistan, carried water for the war, (3) they believe, as we journalists tend to do everywhere, that bad news is the definition of news, thus they compete to scoop each other on bad news even when good things start happening, and (4) they believe, as do we all, that holding powerful people accountable is the noblest of mission.
I concur about (4), but there is no accountability without context. And that’s the big omission in so much of the “liberal media’s” coverage. Either some of the Washington journalists are too young to know about 2002-3, or they’re seasoned people suffering from willful amnesia.
The George W. Bush administration launched a nation-building mission in Afghanistan, only to dilute our resources there by marching into a war in Iraq that was founded on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. That is an incontrovertible fact. And the Bush team’s success in sucking us into Iraq was greatly aided and abetted by – presto! – the so-called “liberal media.”
As one insider from that era remarked years ago, “Bush and his White House were engaging in a carefully- orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources…And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it…And the truth – about the actual nature of the threat posed by Saddam, the right way to confront it, and the possible risks of military conflict – would get largely left behind.”
Care to guess who wrote that? Former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan.
Yup, the “liberal” watchdogs went belly up. The New York Times ran scary WMD stories that were spun by pro-war sources close to Dick Cheney. The Washington Post ran hawkish stories on page one; skeptical stories citing skeptical intelligence sources – and there were such stories – were buried well inside the paper. MSNBC even fired a popular talk show host, Phil Donahue, because he was openly hostile to the imminent U.S. invasion; according to a leaked internal memo, the brass felt that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” Just to cite a few examples.
The “liberal media” canard should have been junked long ago – like maybe when the Washington press corps was subservient to Ronald Reagan (as detailed in the revealing book, On Bended Knee); or maybe when The Times was relentlessly focused during the ’90s of the Clintons’ minor Whitewater affair; or maybe when the “liberal media” kept mocking Al Gore for supposedly saying that he invented the Internet (which in truth he never said). And if the cheerleading for war in Iraq wasn’t sufficient evidence of ill-liberalism, how about the breathless ’16 coverage of Hillary’s emails?
Yet conservatives continue to say, “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media!” But given the media’s track record – and its current treatment of Biden, accountability without context – they’re getting a great deal.