Because they're doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race - providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Joe Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would probably be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times put it: "As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it's not so." They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
According to one journalist's tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since June's TV debate with Trump, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech it wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker's editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away "would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment" and had a staff writer suggest Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.
This story is from the July 12, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the July 12, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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