Megan McArdle, a libertarian-leaning opinion columnist, likely angered her own newsroom with a post-debate column last week. Citing the first-hand accounts of fellow journalists, she said they allowed the White House to hide Biden’s worsening condition because they allowed themselves to be bullied and manipulated. The reason that was allowed, she wrote, is because those liberal reporters share the same political ideology and let down their guard.
“As a result,” McArdle concludes, “viewers of Fox News understood the president’s condition better than our audiences, which ought to be a huge wake-up call for us.”
That sentence alone is akin to heresy to many Democrats, who hate Fox News as badly as they hate Donald Trump, but McArdle wasn’t finished. The solution to being blindsided, she advised, is to add more “viewpoint diversity” – meaning conservatives – in the newsrooms.
Tim Graham, of the Media Research Center, tells AFN it is true the Biden administration is very good with the carrot-and-stick routine when it comes to curious reporters.
That tactic, performed often by all sides in politics, uses access as the carrot and an unreturned phone call or email as the stick.
“The Biden folks really manipulated them this way,” he says, “where you better not write about the subject, it's our unfavorite subject. You're going to get a stern talking to if you work on this subject.”
On the issue of liberal bias, which MRC has documented daily since the 1980s, Graham credits a Washington Times columnist for observing that there is no need for a conspiracy if there is a consensus.
“Liberal journalists don't have to conspire with each other,” Graham advises. “They all have a group think: always Trump is worse. They've got ‘evil monster’ Trump in their minds, then everything about Biden is just really not very interesting.”
Tapper then vs. now
Now that the liberal media has turned on Biden, CNN host Jake Tapper might have delivered one of the best examples of journalism malpractice. Back in 2020, Tapper lectured Lara Trump after she joked on stage about Biden’s inability to “get the words out” when he was speaking before crowds at political rallies.
“How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper demanded to know.
When she mentioned concerns about Biden’s “cognitive decline,” Tapper cut her off and told Trump she had “no standing” to diagnose Biden.
Moving forward four years, after co-hosting the debate, Tapper concluded last week Biden was “not coherent” when he attempted to participate in a scripted radio interview.
“His campaign felt the need to feed questions to the host for a call-in radio interview,” Tapper, appearing frustrated, told the CNN audience. “And the president still, even then, failed to deliver in many of his answers.”
On the issue of viewpoint diversity raised by McArdle , Graham says newsrooms can also pledge to do their journalism jobs with honesty and integrity.
“They don't have to hire 26 Republicans to present a more balanced news picture,” he says. “I think they just have to pretend to think like Republicans from time to time.”
