DETROIT – If you follow politics, you probably know that Democrats and President Biden suffered a “huge setback” or a “stunning rebuke” in the off-year elections two weeks ago.
You “know” that, because you saw it on cable news, or read it the next day either in print or online.
The only problem was this: It wasn’t really true.
That is, it wasn’t true in a factual sense. Forty years ago, in his famous essay, “The Idiot Culture,” Carl Bernstein noted that when it came to covering what was really going on in America, “the media – weekly, daily, hourly – break new ground in getting it wrong.”
This is often especially true when it comes to elections. This year, the Virginia governor’s race was seen as a dead heat, while the one in New Jersey was expected to be a Democratic landslide.
But on election night, early returns had the Republican in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, running more than 200,000 votes ahead, while Phil Murphy, the popular governor of New Jersey, was behind his Republican challenger.
The talking heads on CNN, which I was watching, then decided it was a big defeat for the Democrats. So did most or all of the other networks, and that immediately became the accepted wisdom.
Except it wasn’t. Late returns tend to favor Democrats in most states. Days later, Youngkin’s winning margin in Virginia was down to barely 60,000 votes. Meanwhile, New Jersey’s Democratic governor had won by about 75,000.
Each party won one and lost one. Overall, Democratic candidates had gotten more votes than the Republicans. Though Murphy’s race was closer than expected, he became the first Democratic governor reelected in New Jersey since 1977.
Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat who lost in Virginia, was a gaffe-prone and shopworn candidate who still lost by just two percentage points. Virginians have a history of turning against the party in the White House in off-year elections.
The year after Barack Obama won the presidency, the Democratic candidate for governor lost in a 17-point landslide.
In other words, the media could just as easily have framed this year’s result as a surprisingly good one for Democrats, given that their agenda had been bogged down for weeks in Congress.
But they did not, and millions were left with that false impression. Days later, a federal judge told me he was sorry Phil Murphy had lost. He was astonished when I told him he hadn’t.
This was worth discussing at length because of the perception that many news outlets, including CNN, have a huge left-wing bias and never pass up an opportunity to make Republicans look bad.
In this case, they didn’t. What the news media do suffer from is a perpetual rush to judgment, and also a need for conflict, and to turn nearly every story into a something between a three-act play and an epic sports event where the lead keeps changing hands.
In his Idiot Culture essay, still the best critique of the news media I’ve ever read, Bernstein said “The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a major story, or more precisely, to seem behind.”
Once, the mantra of the news business was “get it first, but be sure you get it right.” Now, in the age of perpetual on-air and online publishing, the get-it-right part has become very secondary.
None of this has helped boost public confidence in the news media, to put it mildly, and that too is worrisome for democracy.
That’s not to say that journalists have always been popular. They usually have been anything but, with being a reporter scoring about as low on the admired occupation scale as used car dealers. After all, journalists were usually bringing us bad news:
But they were accepted in a way they no longer are, for a number of disturbing reasons. Despite grumbling, there was a general belief that if something was printed in a mainstream newspaper or mentioned on the network news, it was true.
Disturbing, often annoying, but true.
The high water mark of American journalism may have come in 1974, two years after Carl Bernstein and his Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward began to expose the Watergate scandal.
They were bitterly resisted every step of the way by officials who, Bernstein noted, “would attack us as purveyors of hearsay, character assassination and innuendo.”
Eventually, it turned out that essentially everything they reported was true. President Nixon resigned, and a large number of his aides went to jail. Reporters were briefly heroes.
But something was very different then. There was a general national consensus that we really were one people, and that both parties were trying to make life better for all Americans.
Republicans and Democrats usually regarded each other as the opposition, not as evil enemies who had to be destroyed.
The Fairness Doctrine required broadcast media – then as now the way most people get their news — to really strive to be fair and balanced in their reporting. None of that is true today.
The Fairness Doctrine has been gone since 1987. Now, most people get their news from one or another ideological network.
Back in the days of Watergate, facts mattered.
Once it had been proven that Richard Nixon had lied, even his fellow Republicans joined in forcing him to resign.
Would that happen today?
Back when it was reported that the polio vaccine was safe and effective, nobody, as far as I can tell, resisted getting their shot.
Today, the best scientific experts in the world have failed to persuade millions to get a free simple injection that may save their lives from the greatest pandemic in history.
Journalism is in many ways harder to do than ever, and perhaps even more necessary, if we are to survive.
Think about that.
-30- (Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade)
