2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumShocker: WaPo Investigates Itself for Anti-Sanders Bias, Finds There Was None (LOL)
On Tuesday, FAIR published a straightforward recapping of 16 hours of Washington Post stories that displayed a remarkable run of negative articles about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The FAIR post and a corresponding tweet went viral: retweeted thousands of times, shared on Facebook and Reddit thousands more, and written up in TruthDig, The Young Turks, USUncut and the Daily Caller.
Due to this surge of coverage of our coverage of its coverage (yes, media criticism gets somewhat meta), the Washington Post (3/8/16) decided to respond to our criticism, staffing out the unenviable task to The Fixs Callum Borchers, who gave us:
Has the Washington Post Been Too Hard on Bernie Sanders This Week?
Right off, the framing is inaccurate: The scope wasnt this week, it was a 16-hour period after the Flint, Michigan, debateand following a weekend in which Sanders won three of four state contests with Hillary Clinton. The do-or-die stakes for Sanders in Michigan couldnt have been higher, and how one of the most influential newspapers in the United States covered his debate performance and his primary showing was important.
After arguing that working for the Washington Post would not impede his ability to show why the paper was in the right, Borchers begins by casting aspersions on Sanders conspiratorial partisans:
The notion of an anti-Sanders agenda clearly resonatedno surprise, given that the Vermont senator has complained about media coverage, generally, and the Post, specifically.
It doesnt resonate, is the implication, because its actually true; it must be that Dear Leader has poisoned minds with thoughts of media conspiracy.
Borchers main effort is to narrow the definition of a negative story.
First, the definition of negative in this case and in a lot of media griping is overly broad. For example, the negative category, according to FAIR, included a story by The Fixs Philip Bump with the following headline: Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Wont Be No. 1 in Incarceration. Hell Need to Release Lots of Criminals.
Bump pointed out that to keep a campaign promise At the end of my first term, we will not have more people in jail than any other country Sanders would need to set free roughly a quarter of the United States prison population, or about 567,000 criminals.
Is that negative? I mean, its math.
At a moment when even the Koch brothers are coming out against overincarceration, a story that thumbnails it as releasing lots of criminals can indeed be considered a negative framing, if not more importantly one that shortchanges readers intelligence and understanding.
Still, note that negative is not intended as the opposite of factual. When the George Bush Sr. campaign focused on Michael Dukakis prison furlough programthe so-called Willie Horton issueits attacks were nominally fact-based. Yet many people saw them as an unfair exploitation of racial fears, and it was relevant to address them on those terms.
Bigger picture: The reason the graphic and FAIRs blog post went so viral is because people can intuitively look at a litany of stories over such a short period and see bias. Nature made us pattern-seeking mammals for a reason, and the Washington Posts post-debate coverage displays an obvious pattern.
And Borchers doesnt so much deny that pattern as attempt to justify it:
It is important, of course, that a newspapers opinion and analysis pieces reflect a range of perspectives. Overall, I can confidently say the Posts do. But if youre going to take a one-day sample on a day when Sanders was coming off a debate performance that was widely panned youre going to find a lot of opinion and analysis that reflects that consensus.
His evidence, though, is unpersuasive; for evidence that Sanders debating was widely panned, he links only to a piece by Salons Amanda Marcotteauthor of such articles as Why Im Supporting Clinton Over Sanders and Lets Storm the Sanders He-Man Women-Haters Club.
Its true that many corporate media pundits thought Sanders did poorly in the Flint debate, and that opinion was the content of many of the negative stories that FAIR highlighted. But that only spurs questions about the editorial choice to focus overwhelmingly on debate etiquette in a time period in which Sanders actual electoral performance included a victory in the Maine caucuses (announced during the Flint debate) and top pollings in two out of three states. The former reflects pundits opinions, while the latter reflects actual voters choices.
For a piece ostensibly intended to prove the Post unbiased, Borchers conclusion is problematic, in that it suggests that they are biased, but consider it compensatory:
Finally, even if we accept the idea that Post reporting, analysis and commentary combined to put Sanders through the wringer, I fail to see the inherent trouble. As Ive written before, Sanders skated through the early portion of the primary season on stories about his yuge crowds and better-than-expected poll numbers. It was one of the perks of being an underdog.
Readers and voters dont ask for media to use their coverage to offer perks or comeuppances to candidates as they see fit, but to render accurate coverage that reflects what voters are concerned about.
In this case, a dry-eyed reading suggests that the range of perspectives reflected by the Posts pundit roster simply does not include many people who identify with the challenge to the political establishment Sanders candidacy reflectsand considerably more people who feel an affinity with the network of political, economic and media elites who have thrown their support behind Clinton. That this should be reflected in their editorial decision-making is not particularly surprising, just worthy of consideration.
http://fair.org/home/shocker-wapo-investigates-itself-for-anti-sanders-bias-finds-there-was-none/
brentspeak
(18,290 posts)Lizzie Poppet
(10,164 posts)And apparently the only Borchers worth giving a shit about has a big red beard and plays soccer for Portland Timbers FC...
casperthegm
(643 posts)Said no one ever. I'd love to see someone do a documentary based on the media coverage of the 2016 election. I think it would be fascinating if someone could really pull back the curtain and see just how far the corruption in the media goes.