Perry Bacon Jr. — which is the name of a Washington Post writer, not a sandwich at Arby’s — has managed to have the dumbest excuse to date for why Joe Biden’s approval numbers are somewhere between bad and “get this man out of the White House right now before he kills us all.”
Bacon wrote on Monday, presumably with a straight face, that a major factor driving the president’s approval ratings to lower than Donald Trump’s is that the news media’s coverage has been “anti-Biden.” He actually said that.
“In the first few months of 2021, many in the media focused on narratives that seemed like they could turn into big anti-Biden stories but didn’t pan out,” wrote Perry. By “anti-Biden stories,” he meant the few times reporters asked the president why vaccines were so slow to distribute and whether he planned to do anything to stem the tide of obscene numbers of migrants illegally crossing the southern border.
It’s apparently “anti-Biden” to inquire whether he actually plans to do anything about our most urgent problems.
But, Perry said, it was the disastrous and fatal withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that really did Biden in with the press. “Afghanistan was an important turning point in media coverage for two reasons,” he wrote. “One, it provided journalists the big anti-Biden story that I think many of them were desperate to find. And it drove down Biden’s popularity with the public, giving the media justification for even more coverage that cast the president as struggling.”
Ah, yes! Remember the days of yore when the media were so obviously “desperate” to find a reason to kneecap Biden. The memories are fond.
It’s preposterous. Even now, media coverage of the Biden administration is relegated to one-minute news briefs about the president and Kamala Harris’s latest screw-ups, only between hour-long segments about the Jan. 6 House hearings.
Perry wrote that he would like for the press to “cover Biden more positively.”
Hey guys, could you put a positive spin on the historic inflation, the new war that Biden is marching us toward, and the record-high gas prices? That would be swell.
Biden isn’t where he is by a stroke of bad luck. His approval rating isn’t embarrassingly low because reporters aren’t giving him enough credit. And his own party’s voters aren’t on their knees praying he doesn’t run for a second term because journalists haven’t properly shown them the silver lining.
Biden isn’t the victim of an awful press. They’re the ones who sold him to America. We’re the victims of the media and his presidency.