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Wes Moore: A Study in Media Bias.
Those who have been following the upcoming election cycle may have noted that Wes Moore (current governor of Maryland) has quietly been dropped from top ten lists and is starting to be listed as someone who might not run.
This raises some questions – he’s popular, charismatic, ethnically preferable, a Clooney favorite. What happened if he was so ascendent?
The answer is… unbiased investigative reporting, that for now is mostly swept under the rug but would certainly pop up in the primary and beyond.
The Washington Free Beacon has done two reports on Moore in recent months that are probably best considered bombshells and exclusionary.
The reporting on this reasoned, clear, pretty close to air tight and with lots of room for fire that was held back (Mark Halperin notes that if he was the editor he would have tossed in a lot more).
Moore’s camp just says that it’s all Republican BS hit pieces, which is about as close to admission of guilt as you can get. Seeing this story, which hasn’t gotten much airtime, concerns me.
Our big media outlets just aren’t investigating (unless of course, it’s the Right). We saw this with Biden’s trivially obvious cognitive decline that now all Washington insiders admit was obvious and clear.
I’m not sure that Western society can function without bilateral media scrutiny, but you see things ignored, swept under the rug until convenient, and just discounted with “well that’s the NY Post” with no engagement of the facts.
What can we do about this, anything?
Bari Weiss taking over CBS was supposed to help, but that tree has yet to bear fruit.
Perhaps more concerningly – what else are we missing. Biden became eventually obvious, Moore got scrutiny in a presidential election. Most politically involved people know about Jay Jones’s comments.
What else is out there, well known, and not addressed because it’s on the right team?
Media is hard since humans are self-interested monkeys that want to lie and exaggerate to dunk on their outgroup all the time. From that baseline, the mainstream media is quite good, as long as you ignore its coverage on identity-related issues.
There are certainly valid criticisms of the media, but what's telling is MAGA's utter failure to offer up a credible alternative after an entire decade. There's no law that prevents them from doing this, it would just require consistent work on par with what the NYT produces, and enough impartiality not to be written off as blatant right wing propaganda. This would benefit not only the Right, but the Republic as a whole for having a credible alternative. Instead... we get stuff like Nick Shirley -- a kernel of a real problem reported in regards to Somali fraud, but wrapped up in layers of partisan nonsense.
This doesn't exist. During the height of the Daily Show's popularity, Fox News' news programming was purportedly actually quite good. And that counted for absolutely nothing with the wider media environment because Glenn Beck had an opinion show, and thus FAUX NEWS.
There is no degree of impartiality that will cause a zealous, mind-killed left-partisan to not write a neutral media source off as "blatant right wing propaganda", because calling everything to the right of AOC "blatant right wing propaganda" is an important tool for maintaining the power of their blatant left wing propaganda.
It doesn't need to be impartial enough to win over deranged leftists, just enough of the center that people like myself or Scott or Bryan Caplan or Richard Hanania or Nate Silver could look at it and see a relatively competitive alternative. The easiest niche would be on identity topics since the MSM is quite bad on those, but right-leaning news is also terrible so we're in a "pick your poison" environment on that issue. On most other topics the NYT is good enough that it can generally be trusted within terms of bounded distrust that reading it will be a lot better than the average right wing news source, which at this point isn't so much Fox News as it is Tucker, Candace, and Rogan.
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