Wealthy voters on the left seem to prefer confirmation bias over journalistic acumen from their preferred media sources.
Only last Wednesday, ABC Radio National breakfast host Patricia Karvelas complained about the number of texts from listeners criticising her for following the story of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s relationship with former Qantas boss Alan Joyce, one of the best domestic political stories of the year.
It’s worse in the United States where The New York Times and broadcasters such as MSNBC and CNN scrutinise only conservatives but are rewarded by readers and viewers for their bias.
The Washington Post, among the worst of America’s Trump “derangement syndrome” products, was hit by a subscriber strike when owner Jeff Bezos decided a fortnight ago that his masthead would not editorialise in favour of either candidate in Tuesday’s (Wednesday AEST) US presidential election.
Readers who quit the newspaper in protest apparently forgot it had been a relentless, one-eyed campaigner against Donald Trump since before the 2016 election.
Nor had it ever seen the slightest sign of mental decline by incumbent President Joe Biden until his confusion could no longer be denied when debating Trump in late June.
This column is amused by the loyalty of Democrat voters to news products that seem unable to report the truth about Democrats; to own up to their mistakes about Republicans; or to predict political events correctly.
And it’s not just the US outlets mentioned above that are the problem. The ABC spent years pushing the false Russiagate narrative we now know was a Democrat National Committee stitch-up supported by Obama-era intelligence figures – the same ones who mistakenly dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post in late 2020 as Russian disinformation.
The New York Times has also been ratcheting up its anti-Trump news and opinion pieces. The pace of these stories accelerated after October 23 when it published influential pollster and professional gambler Nate Silver saying the polls were too close to call but his “gut instinct” was for a Trump win.
The problem for Democrats is Vice-President Kamala Harris can’t really separate herself from the poor economic performance and high government spending of Biden.
Nor can she criticise Biden’s poor handling of wars in Ukraine and Gaza, or timidity on China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Conversely, voters seem likely to accept Trump’s boast that today’s wars would not have occurred had he still been president.
Not a natural public policy person, Harris is left with only an exaggerated negative campaign against Trump. Last week she was happy to call him a fascist and Hitler wannabe. Yet she and her media supporters insist it’s Trump who is divisive.
The Wall Street Journal has been honest in assessing Trump’s problems. His refusal to accept defeat in 2020 and the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 should have disqualified him from public office, it has argued.
Yet the legal pursuit of Trump by Democrat state prosecutors, and the party’s tendency to deride Trump supporters, have only rallied support for him.
Bret Stephens, a thoughtful conservative who left the WSJ for the Times in 2017, was close to the truth in a piece he wrote on the cultural assumptions of the left about Trump voters. The condescension of Democrat grandees – think the Obamas – towards ordinary voters is, at least to this column, every bit as damaging as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” comment about working-class mid-western voters who had once voted for the Democrats but moved to Trump.
Wrote Stephens: “Aside from being gratuitous and self-defeating – what kind of voter is going to be won over by name-calling – it’s also mostly wrong. Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly are people who think the Biden-Harris years have been bad for them and the country.”
Biden effectively showcased Stephens’ argument himself on Wednesday in response to a comedian’s remarks at a Trump rally calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage’’. Biden said “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”. It hurt Harris because it confirms what people think: rich Democrats despise ordinary voters.
The Journal’s former editor-in-chief, Gerard Baker, nailed the problem on October 28. Voters can see all the problems with Trump and still be concerned about the Democrats manipulating those very reasonable concerns “to validate retrospectively the damage they have wrought in the past four years and approve proactively what they might do in the next four”.
“Many Americans want to tell the Democrats: ‘You don’t get to drive the country ever further into your progressive dystopia … and then turn around and say to the voters: Sorry but it’s us or Hitler’.”
The biggest Democrat blunder has been attempts by the party’s district attorneys in state jurisdictions to destroy Trump in the courts: the so-called lawfare campaign that has driven voter sympathy for Trump.
Many journalists and lawyers have criticised the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, arguing that for most of the country’s legal history this would have been a misdemeanour at worst.
Even the UK’s New Statesman, one of the most left-wing journals in the English language, has criticised this lawfare.
On June 5 it published Sohrab Ahmari, founder and editor of online magazine Compact, arguing progressives around the world needed to speak out about political partiality in the US legal system and the endless persecution of Trump.
The Wall Street Journal nailed the problem in a July 9 editorial after the Supreme Court found the presidency enjoys constitutional immunity for official acts.
The Journal Editorial Board wrote: ‘’Is there a hall of fame for political backfires? Democrats cheered on the prosecutions of Mr Trump, hoping they’d guarantee his defeat. Instead they energised his re-election effort.”
This became obvious after Trump was shot in the ear at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13 and got back to his feet fist-pumping and yelling “fight, fight, fight” into the microphone.
Yet it’s not like Trump has no policy vulnerabilities.
Fifty per cent of voters now approve of the job he did as president, but Harris is vulnerable economically because of Biden’s overreach, especially on the inflationary and green Inflation Reduction Act.
A better candidate could have made a serious point about Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on all imports to America. This will only increase prices for Americans and bring tariff reprisals.
A poll of 50 economists published in the Journal on October 14 found most thought Trump’s policies, while they might stimulate growth, would add more to inflation and the federal deficit than Harris’s.
For this column’s money, Harris’s main problem is not that she covered for Biden, failed as his “border tsar” to halt illegal immigration, or is weak on policy. It’s her association with California’s extreme identity politics.
While left-wing journalists write about Trump’s misogyny, violent language and propensity to cosy up to dictators, a lot of voters are more suspicious of politicians and media who think gender, race and patriotism are simply social constructs.
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