If they are seeing more clearly now, it is only because the evidence has become so overwhelming that it is impossible to ignore.
If they are seeing more clearly now, it is only because the evidence has become so overwhelming that it is impossible to ignore.
I n the run-up to the 2020 election, legacy-media outlets went to Herculean lengths to block and tackle for Kamala Harris. Almost any criticism of Harris was swiftly flagged and scolded for its internalized racism, sexism, and or both — the “double bind” of “racism and sexism” that shows “not only the bias that women and people of color face, but the fact that for women of color, that bias is more than the sum of its parts,” as an October 2020 New York Times analysis put it. Even the allegation that Harris was “phony” was off-limits — “when used against a person, and especially a woman of color, experts say” charges of phoniness have “a harmful subtext,” the Times counseled.
Those “experts” are noticeably absent from the more recent coverage of the first half-black, half–South Asian woman to serve as vice president. There are signs that at least some journalists are beginning to suspect that Harris isn’t living up to the world-historic god-queen caricature that their profession spent the last few years constructing for her. In the past week, the nation’s two papers of record — the New York Times and the Washington Post — have each published pieces gingerly raising questions about Harris’s conspicuous mediocrity. On that front, the Times and the Post are well behind the decisive majority of Americans, who have been telling pollsters they disapprove more than they approve of Harris for the better part of a year and a half.
These “Harris is in trouble” analyses have become something of a budding subgenre in mainstream media. But as Jim Geraghty pointed out, the latest crop of think pieces comes with the new revelation that Harris’s allies in the Democratic Party are starting to lose faith in her. How were said allies able to keep their faith for this long in the first place? “Democratic Party officials and like-minded members of the mainstream media have created this closed circle of information, where party officials tell the media how great they are, the media echoes the assessment of how great they are, and Democrats walk around convinced they’re doing terrific,” Jim writes. Add that to Harris’s immutable identity traits, and the inevitable allegation that even the mildest criticism is yet another solemn reminder of this nation’s long, painful history of singling out and/or marginalizing black women, and the vice president was largely insulated from scrutiny for her first year in office.
Of course, right-wing echo chambers exist, too. But the mainstream media’s reach is much greater, resulting in more of a “closed circle” among Democrats, as Jim wrote in a follow-up today:
That means that Republicans usually know what’s being discussed in the mainstream media, whether they care to know it or not. But Democrats don’t encounter conservative media unless they deliberately seek it out, and thus it is largely ignored in their circles. For obvious reasons, conservative media are more likely to notice the flaws of Democratic figures, and yet in the minds of many Democrats, the very fact that something is being reported by conservative media somehow illegitimizes it. It’s only “real” when it comes from, or is verified by, one of their preferred sources.
That’s true, of course, but it’s also a symptom of a much larger and more systemic problem. There’s a fundamental reason that Harris’s allies seem so bewildered by the fact that the majority of the country finds her less than compelling. The so-called “New York Times effect” (i.e., the Times’ ability to set and define the terms and conditions of national political discourse) is akin to “the Pareto principle — a small fraction of the population controlling a large portion of the wealth, in which 80 percent of consequences come from 20 percent of causes,” as I pointed out last June. Conservatives can pound the table about media bias and pine for a world in which it wasn’t so, but the practical reality is that a disproportionate amount of right-wing commentary involves discussing and responding to outlets such as the Times.
But the Times doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the power of mainstream-media narratives is sustained by a much larger institutional apparatus than journalists alone. The power disparity between left-wing and right-wing media is a reflection of a broader disparity between conservative and progressive narratives. Progressive premises, ideas, and values enjoy something akin to hegemony in the mainstream institutions that define society’s norms, which means that progressive narratives are often viewed as normative, taken as the baseline of any political discourse. The conservative alternative, on the other hand, is defined as explicitly ideological. Hence the well-documented phenomenon of conservatives invariably being blamed for the “culture war,” even in instances in which they are only responding to left-wing provocations. Progressivism is neutral and apolitical; conservatism is inherently political. Thus, an issue is only “politicized” when conservatives intervene for or against it.
In this sense, it is not the biases of individual journalists, nor even the bias of entire media institutions, that produce the “closed circle” and its attendant blind spots; it’s the water that those individuals and institutions swim in. The milieu that both Harris’s allies and New York Times journalists inhabit — spanning major media outlets, publishing houses, academia, activist groups and foundations, the federal bureaucracy, multinational corporations, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and most of the nation’s other elite institutions — is, for the most part, an expression of the same fundamental class, occupying the same social strata, professing the same basic worldview, and working toward the same basic goals.
The inability of Harris-aligned Democrats to see beyond their insular perch is a function of their embedment in what has been described as the “New Class,” or what National Review co-founder James Burnham categorized as the “managerial elite” — credentialed technocrats deriving their power, status, and ideological cues from the mass bureaucracies, both public and private, that have steadily subsumed and replaced entrepreneurial capitalism and local elites over the course of the last century. It is not only media bias, but the biases of the entire class itself — including the special prestige it awards to nonwhite, non-male identity status — that prevent it from seeing Harris through the eyes of the majority of Americans. If they are seeing more clearly now, it is only because the evidence has become so overwhelming that it is impossible to ignore.