According to an exclusive story by news website Semafor, the Biden presidential campaign is sitting down with reporters and editors from prominent news outlets for off-the-record chats about their poor coverage. Citing two sources, who are likely members of the media, the story says the Biden campaign is sharing a spreadsheet with the media that shows where news stories have “fallen short” in the eyes of the unhappy Democrat operatives.
The news outlets invited to hear how terrible they are doing are ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, NPR, Reuters, and Bloomberg, according to the story.
Curtis Houck, of media watchdog Media Research Center, says it is not unusual for a political campaign to lobby reporters with positive story ideas about their candidate, but the Semafor story makes it clear the liberal reporters and editors are getting a tongue lashing, too.
“What they're saying is, 'You need to be tougher on Trump. You need to praise us more. Here's how you're going to do it.’” he says of the now-revealed political meetings.
The audacity to do that is especially irritating to Houck and MRC, which document liberal media bias daily that praises the Left and criticizes the Right. In just two recent examples, the Post ran cover for scandal-plagued Hunter Biden and the haughty Times lectured the struggling public about so-called Bidenomics.
Anyone who flips the channel to MSNBC, for example, knows the positive media coverage of Biden is counter-balanced with scary stories that Donald Trump is a looming danger to democracy. That non-stop coverage of Trump earned MSNBC the label “King of Nazi Analogies” from MRC thanks to its hyperventilating co-hosts and political analysts.
All of that biased media coverage, which is not biased enough for the Biden campaign, has left Houck in disbelief.
“This is like what you see in China,” he warns, “with Xi Jinping demanding total loyalty from state-run media.”
As the 2024 campaign kicks off, Houck says the liberal news media finds itself in a bit of a bind: The reporters and editors despise Donald Trump but they need him for page clicks and viewers.
“Having a Donald Trump campaign means they can survive while also priming and driving up fear among their readership,” he says.
