The Media Could Easily Win This Election

By Rich Lowry

Monday, November 04, 2024

 

The presidential race is essentially tied, so if there’s a small polling error here or there, the media could easily still emerge victorious.

 

The press has been such an active participant in the Trump–Harris race that it will be a significant defeat for it if Trump prevails and a marked victory if he comes up short.

 

“It’s The Sun Wot Won It” was the famous headline in the U.K. newspaper The Sun after its hostile coverage helped take down Neil Kinnock, the Labour candidate for prime minister, in 1992.

 

If Trump goes down, CNN could be forgiven for running a chyron, “It’s the most respected name in news wot won it.”

 

The legacy media will avoid taking any credit for a Trump defeat, of course, since they are so invested in the notion of their own objectivity — in fact, they will deny that they were anything but rigorously fair-minded and professional.

 

Media bias isn’t new. In 1992, Republicans bought “Annoy the Media, Re-Elect Bush” bumper stickers. Now, we’ve entered a whole new phase of corruption.

 

We’ve witnessed practically every day the equivalent of the Hunter-laptop story from 2020; not the same circumstance — social-media’s suppressing a legitimate news story — but the same placement of a fist on the scales.

 

None of it has been subtle.

 

With honorable exceptions, the media went along with the effort to keep Joe Biden’s reduced state under wraps earlier this year and then unleashed on him after his debate performance had convinced Democrats that their rickety standard-bearer could cost them the White House.

 

They eagerly adopted the story line of “brat” summer when Harris was first elevated to the top of the ticket, cheerleading rather than scrutinizing.

 

They express alarm at Donald Trump, saying he will prosecute his political opponents, without being the least bit concerned that Trump’s political opponents have prosecuted him.

 

Sunday-show interviews are almost invariably mini debates between the anchor and any Republican guests, with the moderator insisting on having the last word in any exchange.

 

The media tried to blame Trump for the assassination attempts against him.

 

The debate fact-checking was always deployed against one side, sometimes erroneously, and in the vice-presidential debate, CBS did it after promising not to.

 

As far as I’ve noticed, Harris has been permitted to say, uncontradicted, that Trump has pledged to be a dictator on Day One (he joked that he wouldn’t be a dictator except on Day One) and that he intends to use the military against people who disagree with him (he said the National Guard or military should be deployed to stop hypothetical postelection rioting — at which point he wouldn’t be in office yet, by the way).

 

The press drove the narrative about the ethnic jokes from a roast comic at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally — especially a line about Puerto Rico’s being a floating island of garbage — supposedly proving that the MSG event was hateful and fascistic. At the same time, the press minimized and went along with the White House’s “apostrophe” interpretation of Joe Biden’s related garbage gaffe.

 

The examples go on and on. Sometimes old lies are repeated so often, and new ones introduced with such conviction, that it’s not clear whether some journalists realize that they are trafficking in things that aren’t true.

 

The dire misuse of media power is analogous to Joe Biden’s abuse of his executive power.

 

If you think that Trump is a budding authoritarian, it makes no sense to establish new precedent for unilateral executive overreach; still, Biden has been completely heedless.

 

By the same token, if you believe that Trump’s potentially claiming that the election was rigged in the event of a loss is a threat to American democracy, it is a bad idea to give him easy fodder for his argument that he was done dirty; the media persist nonetheless.

 

Unlike Biden, who has been checked by the courts and is leaving office unpopular and largely disregarded, the press might succeed. Then, it will wonder why it’s more distrusted and hated than ever.