Beltway media will get more delusional under Biden...

This article was originally published on 11/23/2020 for my informal email list. I’m re-posting some of my earlier newsletters here as a gradual process to shift to Substack. 

Forwarding a NYT article by Ben Smith, former Buzzfeed editor-in-chief: "Get Me Meacham! Biden Brings Back the Media’s Good Old Days.” It says that “the next president promises to do for old-line newspaper columnists what Donald Trump did for cable. What a time to be George Will!” 

“A former Obama aide, Tommy Vietor, recently advised Mr. Biden to focus on going directly to social media and to work closely with friendly left-leaning online outlets. “Give them scoops and access,” he wrote, “and grow their audiences and influence the way Trump’s team has nurtured fringe rags like Newsmax and OAN,” a reference to One America News.” 

I’m not sure if Ben Smith is implying that the media landscape would go back to the “good old days” under Biden, but if he thinks so, he is in a serious cognitive dissonance. 

I interviewed Axios and Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei last Friday, and he pretty much said that all these beltway Washington and New York journalists are delusional. He worries that media outlets are becoming more narrative-driven than fact-based, especially when reporters use their own Twitter accounts to take ideological stances and go on cable programs to rant against the President, which Axios forbids its staff from doing. 

These typical liberal arts college-educated journalists who live in Brooklyn and surround themselves with like-minded friends and opinions on Twitter were so convinced in the Blue Wave – which Jim said he knew wasn’t gonna happen if you spent 2 weeks living in Trumpland, which he did this summer and had since then resisted the narrative. 

If Jim’s criticism has some element of truth, then feeding more “scoops and access” to friendly reporters from legacy media outlets would only exacerbate the disconnect between the beltway media and the greater America. Sure, the media will turn around, but only for the few that work in and read beltway media. They will pat each other on the back at WH Correspondents Dinners, while the vast majority of Americans will resort to even more polarizing discourse. 

With the rise of counter-narrative podcasting (like Joe Rogan, and Policy Punchline ;)), conservative talk radio (Rush Limbaugh), propaganda-ish right-wing programs like Trump’s networks, short digestible misinformation pieces on Twitter and FB, and Trump going on a 2-year campaign rally to destroy Dems in the midterms – how could the discourse become better because Washington Post could more scoops on one of Biden’s policies that he will never push through McConnell’s Senate?

The beltway media will only further discredit themselves in the eyes of most Americans, who will continue to be fascinated by Trump’s rallies and tweets. In fact, the beltway media will likely continue their own rationalist, incessant criticism of Trump.

Eric Weinstein said in his recent podcast with Douglas Murray that 2020 is a year where the narratives emerge so quickly that narratives can’t keep up anymore. Covid, BLM, the elections… the institutions cannot control the narratives; the mainstream outlets fail to understand and cannot guide the narratives; the people want to seek out narratives that are counter to the previous narratives they’re exposed to; and the narratives simply engender more narratives and meta-narratives. It’s worse than Covid’s spread. 

I’ll let you make up your mind about where the media landscape is headed towards next, but there seems to be little room for naive optimism.