Voters really have been feeling the pinch when it comes to inflation, and right on cue, they’re growing more optimistic about the economy now as inflation abates. Speaking of the economy, I have an upcoming story for you that I think persuasively rebuts the notion that voter perceptions about the economy are just a matter of bad “vibes” or unfair media coverage. (The economy also ranks as a bigger concern, at 34 percent, if you lump all economy-related responses together, but not if you take categories like “inflation” and “jobs” separately.) This is despite the fact that immigration is viewed as important by voters in fact, 20 percent of Americans in Gallup’s most recent polling said immigration was the most important problem facing the country, trailing only the vague category of “The government/Poor leadership” at 21 percent. Immigration doesn’t actually get all that much coverage in outlets like the Times, meanwhile - data inbound momentarily - although there’s been more lately with Congress debating a border control bill (a bill that is probably DOA because the GOP has negotiated insincerely, thinking that a border crisis could help Trump in November). But that doesn’t mean the coverage of Biden has been wrong. Should the press also focus on Trump’s age and mental fitness? Yes, please, I’d like to see more of that. This isn’t some scandal ginned up by the media talk to regular people in your life and Biden’s age will come up organically all the time as well. As I’ve written, Biden’s age is a completely legitimate worry - he’s an 81-year-old seeking a second term, and it goes directly to his fitness for office - and one that voters have an extremely high degree of concern about in poll after poll. The other three comparisons are entirely inapt. But this is more of an issue of demand than supply - political junkies really like arguing about these things. I understand that this cluster of topics gets a lot of pickup on Twitter and on Substack. There also isn’t as much coverage of cancel culture-related topics as you might think - yes, I’m going to show you some data on this - especially when it comes to hard news outlets like The New York Times. It has not only been covered proportionately by the Indigo Blob - coverage of Hunter Biden was often explicitly censored. However, as I’ll show you in a moment, there hasn’t been very much coverage of Hunter Biden in the mainstream/center-left media sphere that I call the Indigo Blob, which as I define it excludes expressly conservative outlets like Fox News. The Hunter Biden story is similar to the Clinton email scandal in the sense that it’s a matter of somewhat peripheral importance. I’ve sorted these complaints in very rough order from what I deem to be most reasonable to least reasonable. Ĭoverage of bad economic news is another “But Her Emails” moment. Ĭoverage of immigration is another “But Her Emails” moment. Ĭoverage of Biden’s age is another “But Her Emails” moment. Ĭoverage of ‘cancel culture’ is another “But Her Emails” moment. Some recent examples:Ĭoverage of Hunter Biden is another “But Her Emails” moment. But I do think that Clinton’s email handling was treated with roughly 10x its objective importance, a disproportionate focus even as compared to other scandals that also make my eyes glaze over:īut lately, I’ve seen progressives using #ButHerEmails as a dubious pretext to criticize media coverage that has negative implications for Democrats but is entirely fair and reasonable. So I’m probably biased toward not caring much about this sort of story to begin with. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter you’ll know that I rarely take much interest in the broader category of political scandals. The other important context is that it was kind of a silly story. In particular, the letter sent by then FBI director James Comey that the Bureau was investigating newly-surfaced Clinton emails on Octowhich was breathlessly covered by the media - was correlated with a shift in the polls against Clinton that was larger than her margin of defeat in the tipping-point states. I don’t mean to suggest that coverage of HER EMAILS was the most important factor as compared to, say, Clinton’s misread of the mood of the electorate or the populist backlash that Trump catalyzed. The most important context is that Clinton’s loss was extremely narrow - by a combined 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - and so lots of things might have mattered enough to swing the election to Trump. Did the media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s private email server cost her the 2016 election?Īctually, I don’t think it’s such a crazy theory.
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