Graphic: Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images Since summer’s end, the public has chilled on Joe Biden and his agenda.
Graphic: JoElla Carman/NBC Polls of Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial election, which put Republican Glenn Youngkin slightly ahead in a state that went for Biden by ten points last November, further testify to the president’s woes. Most analyses of Biden’s plight emphasize two factors: the stagnation of his legislative agenda and the deterioration of economic- and public-health conditions.
As for the economy, Biden is presiding over one of the most rapid labor-market recoveries from a recession in modern memory. To the majority of Americans who work for a living, the labor market is historically favorable. This reality is reflected in soaring wages , a sky-high quit rate, several successful strikes, and some public-opinion data: The public’s evaluation of how easy it is to find a job is at a higher point now than it has been at any time since 2000.
Graphic: Seth Ackerman via Substack In Ackerman’s account, the inflation crisis is a fiction that the typical American will only encounter when “reading publications like Politico or the Washington Post as they report from the front lines of the inflation struggle .” This bias has two dimensions. First, the American right has a much more potent propaganda apparatus than the Democrats do. In fact, conservative news outlets have become so dominant that the phrase “mainstream media” has become a misnomer. CNN is considered mainstream and Fox News right wing, but the latter is more prominent than the former: Throughout 2021, America’s most-watched cable-news channel has also been its most unabashedly anti-Biden.
What has changed is the mainstream media’s posture toward the president. This was most overt in its coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal, when the mainstream media subjected Biden to weeks of relentlessly negative coverage. But the media has also eroded Biden’s standing in a more insidious and less intentional way.
Meanwhile, the audience for daily political news is not the median voter but rather high-volume news consumers. For the well informed, whether a perennially debated policy will or will not make it into law is more interesting than primers on what that policy would achieve. So the media isn’t doing anything nefarious when it privileges process over policy in its congressional coverage.