WaPo columnist complains media is ‘obsessed with not offending Republican readers’ – Fox News

Media top headlines September 7

In media news today, Rachel Maddow and other liberal media figures get slammed for 'taking the bait' on false ivermectin overdose story, CNN gets blasted for an article that claims 'Whiteness' will be expanded to 'tan' in a more diverse America, and The New York Times gets mocked for a piece that appeared to defend Biden's Afghanistan exit

A columnist for the Washington Post bemoaned how the rise of the publication Politico led to a media to be too tough on Democrats and too lenient towards Republicans.

On Tuesday, columnist Perry Bacon, Jr. published "How the rise of Politico shifted political journalism off course" where he wrote about the the news publications influence on the media. He noted that while Politico has risen to the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post, its popularity led to "a troubling development for consumers of American political news."

More specifically, Bacon claimed that the Politico method was "obsessed with not offending Republican readers."

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"Politico largely embraced those prevailing orthodoxies of political journalism, particularly in its early days it was Beltway-focused, obsessed with not offending Republican readers, sometimes resembled sports coverage and its leading reporters were nearly all White. It was in many ways just a faster, more interesting version of how politics had long been covered. And that really worked," Bacon wrote.

Bacon elaborated that the media led by Politico "refused" to frame the GOP in unflattering lights when covering ongoing political struggles. For example, he claimed that mainstream press, "wary of angering Republican readers," chose to ignore the "radical and racist behavior" of the GOP during the Obama years.

"So the press spent much of the Obama years acting as if the opposition to him was solely because he had liberal policy ideas on issues such as health care and not because Obama had become both the leader and a symbol of a multicultural America whose values are opposed by many on the right. Wary of angering Republican readers, much of the mainstream press refused to cast the GOP as drifting into radical and racist behavior, even when prominent Republicans would not acknowledge that Obama was born in the United States," Bacon wrote.

Bacon also complained that coverage of the 2016 election was "abysmal."

He wrote, "The focus on Hillary Clintons emails stemmed from the medias reflexive both sides-ism, and an obsession with feuds among Donald Trump's staffers reflected an insider-focused approach to politics gone too far."

Bacon concluded while the media "is doing a much better job describing the high stakes of governing and policy than it did a decade ago," there are still "many bad practices" that remain.

"Stories in the Times and Politico about Republican Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida have downplayed their terrible handling of covid-19. While there were problems with the Biden administrations withdrawal from Afghanistan, the wall-to-wall, highly negative reporting on it also reflects the presss eagerness to demonstrate it will cover him as critically as it did Trump," Bacon wrote.

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Critics hit Bacon's assertion that reporters were only interested in the Clinton email story because of "both sides-ism."

National Review writer David Harsanyi wrote "Reflexive both sides-ism? Clinton engaged in criminal behavior. Most other Americans would be on parole right now."

Wall Street Journal reporter Byron Tau tweeted "Actually stemmed from the fact that the Democratic nominee for president was under criminal investigation by the government for mishandling classified information for a large swath of the campaign."

Founded in 2007, Politico was sold last month to the German media company Axel Springer for about $1 billion.

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WaPo columnist complains media is 'obsessed with not offending Republican readers' - Fox News