Media Bias, 2024 Style
Media bias is nothing new, but media bias in the current Presidential election has reached new lows. One of the starkest examples of it comes from a news organization I once respected, CBS News. I worked for CBS nearly 50 years ago, and I thought it represented the best of the journalism profession. The example I’m about to cite is so egregious that I think it’s safe to say that CBS is now competing with NBC for the worst in journalism from a former mainstream media organization.
So far, the election campaigns of both Republicans and Democrats are close to what my old friend Morton Blackwell likes to call “content free.” Coverage by the legacy media, including CBS, has focused on words like “joy,” “happy” and “upbeat” to distinguish the Harris-Walz campaign from the Trump-Vance campaign, which it likes to call “dark,” “angry” and “negative.” None of those terms has anything to do with actual issues or policy proposals. Some have taken to calling this the “vibes” election, suggested that the “vibes” from each campaign are somehow more important than what they actually propose to do if elected. Particularly in contrasting the Vice Presidential candidates, terms like “encouraging” are used to characterize Walz, while they love to repeat Walz’ term for Vance, which is “weird.” They treat “weird” as if they had suddenly uncovered the key to his complex life story and personality.
This cannot continue for the entire campaign, however. Soon they will have to cover actual positions and policies, and if the recent treatment of one relatively minor economic proposal is any indication, it won’t be responsible coverage. As Molly Hemingway has written in The Federalist, “The only policy plank we really know about the glossy “reintroduction of Kamala Harris” is that she now supports one of Donald Trump’s marquee policies.
Last weekend, the incumbent vice president tried to pass off Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on tips as her own.
[Here’s what Harris said:] “When I am president, we will … eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” she said.
The sudden campaign promise follows months of the presumptive presidential nominee avoiding interviews while flipping on nearly every issue on her platform … [offering a] case study in media bias covering two identical positions from two very different candidates.
When former President Trump declared his crusade to eliminate taxes on tips earlier this summer, the headline from CBS News read, “Trump proposal to exempt tips from taxes could cost $250 billion.”
But when Harris offered her endorsement for the effort, CBS reported, “Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
In other words, Trump is hellbent on ginning up the federal deficit as a consequence of political patronage, while Harris is a determined fighter for the service worker.”
Newsweek even “rebranded” Trump’s tax proposal as “Kamala Harris’ tax proposal.”
The Vance vs. Walz coverage will continue to provide some of the best examples of media bias, both in terms of what is said and in what is not said. Here’s Debra Saunders in Newsmax: “There will be no stories about leaked texts the now-Democratic running mate sent to someone he once considered a friend.
… There will be no outrage that she picked an extremist, a progressive, when she could have gone with a centrist. … I’m watching CNN and hearing words like “folksy” for Walz.”
As I said at the outset, media bias is nothing new in covering politics, but most of the time, that bias is shown in disparate coverage of two candidates’ policy proposals, a function of ideological bias. This year, it’s bias in the disparate coverage of personalities.
(Colin Hanna is President of Let Freedom Ring, USA)
