Enjoy this brief moment of self-reflection and candor from the media while it lasts. Regardless, they need to pay a heavy price this time.
We’re watching the immediate post-2016 election aftermath happen all over again. The news media are reluctantly conceding defeat to Donald Trump and finally admitting the obvious.
On the New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast, reporter Astead Herndon was one such illuminating case. “I just feel as if, whether it is ‘democracy,’ whether it is lecturing Americans, saying inflation is actually not that bad, that there has been a tone coming from Democrats to tell people the problems that they had are not legitimate,” he said. “And I think that is at the core of their problems in this race. It’s hard for me not to go back to the fact that when these issues were most clear and they had a chance to speak to those concerns, they decided not to and they decided to double down on this administration, to double down on the incumbent.”
That’s true but not so fast, sweaty. The media don’t get to act like mildly concerned bystanders now positioned to offer a sober account of what just happened. Kamala Harris’s defeat is every bit theirs as it is the Democrat Party’s, arguably even more so. The media banked that they still had enough cachet, even just by a sliver, to do the impossible — insist to American voters that what they could see and feel wasn’t real in order to
