Joe Biden Is the Perfect President for Our Imperfect Press

Our nation’s political media is broken, and it doesn’t plan on fixing itself anytime soon.

Starting with the 2016 Presidential campaign, the national political media descended into chaos and devolved into D.C.’s version of Page Six. Everything became gossip and innuendo; actual policy be damned.

Many of us hoped there would be a reckoning after it became clear the news media had spread Russian propaganda in the form of hacked e-mails and social media content. Instead, the news media doubled down on the palace intrigue stories, fueled by the hate clicks of millions of liberals who loathed the former President.

The massive blue wave of 2018 changed little. Neither did Joe Biden’s win. Nor did the dual Senate wins in Georgia to turn the Senate blue. The American people were making it very, very clear that they no longer supported MAGA or its impact on the country. The media, for some reason, ignored them.

The biggest myth in this country is the liberal media bias, as day after day, the national news cycle is determined by what Republicans say. For four years, the last guy’s tweets determined what the media would cover. Early in President Biden’s term, whatever Republicans are fake outraged about, starting with “unity” and now onto the “mean” tweets of his nominee for the OMB director, rule the day’s news cycle.

I guarantee you that no one outside of Washington, D.C. cares about the “mean” tweets of a potential Cabinet member, unless those tweets are racist or bigoted. The tweets from Neera Tanden were neither. But it still allowed Republicans to play the fake outrage game — as if anyone could possibly them seriously after the past four years.

Unfortunately for us, the political media did take them seriously. The worst of these instincts were on full display earlier this week when a Washington Post reporter called up a specific “mean” tweet for Sen. Lisa Murkowski to get her reaction.

As a former newspaper reporter, I was horrified by this lack of journalistic ethics. While asking for comment is common practice, calling up an old comment that is specifically being used by the opposing party to fit your pre-written Republican outrage story is absolutely not.