The "big foots"--the major media titans who write for the New York Times and the Washington Post and the other papers that garner the most attention in the U.S. blew the 2022 midterm election. And the rest of the pack--including the TV networks, both the three "legacy" ones and the newer cable ones such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, followed right along and sometimes even led the charge.
They bought hook, line and sinker all the BS that the Republicans cleverly and carefully put out at crucial times in the campaign that claimed that the GOP was riding a "red tidal wave" to massive victory and landslide. Yes, they probably will take the House and possibly the Senate, but there was no wave. There are lots of reasons for this result, but all were downplayed or ignored by Big Media.
First, inflation is certainly always a key issue. Republicans ran on that. Those who pointed out that a lot of it was due to there being a war on in Ukraine which wreaks havoc with farm prices, energy costs, and military budgets. There's also been a supply chain breakdown only beginning to be fixed, which was caused by the pandemic disrupting normal manufacturing processes. It was difficult to get it going again.
Crime was an issue but not anywhere as big as the Rupert Murdoch purveyer of phony news, the New York Post, made it out to be. Crime overall has declined. In some places, including New York, however, murder numbers are up. A.J. Liebling, the greatest press critic, once noted that Hearst sent newsboys out screaming, "Horrible crime! Throw'd a baby off a bus!" about an incident that occurred in Lahore, Pakistan, but which they made sound like it happened in Columbus Circle in New York City.
Democrats were at fault for not taking the issue on and trying to avoid it, along with inflation. There are answers and they are not easy to present, but you get nowhere if you don't try. Yes, the Dems ran a terrible campaign but they still did well, and much more important, they didn't make the Big Media swallow phony Republican polls that said a red wave was upon us. That is the unpardonable crime, that these media outfits that conduct their own polling, accepted the phony stuff and ballyhooed it to the rafters.
We're getting some decent analysis weeks after the damage was done and days after the election was over. Dana Milbank laid it out in the Washington Post today and Monica Hesse showed how abortion and women's rights were right up there in the calculus of decisive issues for the election, while the Big Media poohpoohed it as of minimal concern. Wrong. This issue elected a lot of Democrats. It now seems clear that this issue, which the Democrats campaigned hard on, was a correct one for them to push, and it worked in many places.
The media poobahs and Beltway insiders discounted the significance of Alito's reactionary decision in the Dobbs case because to them, it was old news. Not so for the voters. That's why a lot of the election deniers went down. That and the other maligned issue--the future of democracy when people were running who vowed to disregard the will of the people as expressed by their votes and totally corrupt our elections. And yes, they are still there ready to frustrate the electorate.
Amazingly, people cared about this. The Times is a recidivist violator. They blew up the Hillary Clinton e-mail brouhaha so that it helped Trump win in 2016. Compared to his thousands of lies and corruption, it was a big nothing. They have yet to fess up to the evidence on their hands in that effort to bend over backwards to "be fair" to the GOP liars.
Likewise, they overemphasized James Comey's disgusting violation of Justice Department policy shortly before the 2016 Election Day by announcing the reopening of the e-mail investigation. Comey also said Hillary should be charged, a decision he is supposed to have nothing to do with--it's the responsibility of the Justice Department lawyers and legal leadership, not him. He's a cop.
Ed Murrow was right way back in the '50s when he took on Senator Joe McCarthy when no one else would. "Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves'" --our society, beginning with the media, built up and communicated McCarthy's phony charges and lies. It now seems that the media, and many of us, learned very little from that now ancient experience. Just as they passed on all of Trump's lies and took years to call them what they were and are, they accepted unquestioningly poll numbers created of whole cloth. There should be no Pulitzer Prizes this year.
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