The News
President Joe Biden has lost the media. Even the most sympathetic outlets — the liberal MSNBC, the gentle NPR — have joined the chorus questioning his ability to continue his campaign.
But those outlets, which riveted Democratic audiences through the Trump years, last week faced a furious backlash from viewers and listeners who believe they have betrayed Biden.
NPR’s ombudsman said in her weekly email on Thursday that the organization is flooded with complaints about the intensity of its coverage of Biden’s age, and what audiences perceive as silence on former President Donald Trump’s false statements. Extremely-online pro-Biden Democrats make loud threats online to cancel their subscriptions to publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and New Yorker over the publications’ coverage of calls for Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee.
Over the course of the Trump administration, then-CNN host Brian Stelter used his perch as the host of his Reliable Sources show to report on Trump’s war on facts and the news media, garnering thousands of followers, viewers, and readers. But over the past two weeks, some of those same followers have flooded his Twitter account with complaints about his analysis and posts about Biden’s age.
“Some of the same people who bemoaned paranoia, ignorance and intolerance among Trump supporters are now exhibiting those exact traits in defense of Biden,” he said in a text message. “I think we should take good faith media critiques seriously, but a lot of the complaints I’m seeing are making a category error, expecting journalists to be partisan activists.”
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Nowhere has liberal viewers’ backlash been sharper than at the cable network MSNBC.
Despite a bump immediately after the debate, MSNBC’s primetime ratings have dropped in the subsequent weeks, presumably following a long-held pattern in cable news that when a party’s viewers see discord among their own ranks, they tend to tune out the news. For the week of 7/1, MSNBC garnered just 55,000 viewers between the ages of 25 to 54 years old, tied for the network’s lowest average week in the demo since 2000.
Two people at MSNBC said that network executives were concerned about those numbers, though July tends to be one of the worst months for television news ratings (in a grim turn, the attempted assassination of Trump is almost certain to boost TV news ratings during the RNC next week).
During her show on Wednesday, host Nicolle Wallace acknowledged the awkwardness of reporting the news when the network’s viewership was clearly not happy to hear it.
“I know how difficult this story is for my audience. But I’m not going to shield anyone from the news,” she said. Before leading into a segment on Vice President Kamala Harris’ viability to assume the nomination should Biden step aside, Wallace added, “People are already going to be so angry that we are having this conversation. We may as well go there.”
The network’s programming also reflects some fissures in the anti-Trump coalition. Some like host Chris Hayes have said that Biden has “done nothing wrong” but acknowledged that he appears “increasingly likely to lose.” Others have said that the media’s coverage of Biden has been unfair: Lawrence O’Donnell, one of Biden’s favorite hosts on the network, said the White House press corps was at its “absolute worst” this week in its coverage of Biden’s health.
There is also some discomfort within MSNBC over the comparisons between its flagship Morning Joe program and Trump-era Fox and Friends, one of the former president’s favorite shows.
As I first reported in 2022, hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and regular commentator Mike Barnicle all have close personal ties with the president and other members of the administration. (The Brzezinski family has a decades-long relationship with the Bidens; her father the diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski was close to Biden; her brother Mark Brzezinski is US Ambassador to Poland).
In recent weeks, political insiders have been watching the show obsessively to see whether its hosts will encourage Biden to step aside. While Scarborough has seemed to waver since the debate, Brzezinski has become one of the more vocal skeptics of the push for a new nominee.
The New York Times has also sought to balance its criticism of the president with the concerns of some of its readers. After the Times editorial board called for Biden to step aside in the wake of his poor debate performance, Biden-supporting readers asked why the paper hadn’t made such a proclamation about Trump. On Thursday, the paper followed up its Biden piece with an even stronger condemnation of the Republican candidate.
In an email to Semafor, New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander rejected criticism from both liberals and the notion that said liberals were punishing the paper and canceling subscriptions en masse.
“As an independent news organization, people turn to us to cover the events of the world as they are, not as they want them to be,” he said. “In fact, audiences count on us to do so, especially during periods of important and developing news. We’ve found that the appetite for independent journalism increases during important news moments, despite the sentiments put forward by vocal critics.”
Now What?
Many of the conversations around replacing Biden as the nominee and criticisms of news coverage of Biden’s age were put on hold abruptly on Saturday, following the assassination attempt on Trump. Many elected Democrats told news outlets that they were likely to cease their calls for Biden to step aside, as not to appear unconcerned about the shooting.
Max’s view
Large segments of the US media have spent the last decade riding the wave of resistance to Trump while still trying to hew to old principles of neutrality. That was easier when Trump was in office, and the media could justify its adversarial approach as confronting power. The reward was a strong editorial purpose, along with record subscriptions, web traffic, and television ratings. Covering the Trump administration was also a career-making story for journalists, making some beat reporters famous.
But that approach never transferred to Biden, whose team relished the fact that he was a boring story for reporters accustomed to the five-alarm fire of the Trump years. The current crisis has drawn out the distinctions between different parts of the Democratic base, and exposed just how much Trump has unified his own coalition. For years, liberals defended and cheered on journalists seeking to hold Trump accountable and breathlessly shared revelations about him exposed by the media. Now some of the same crowd feels the news media is cherry-picking examples to make their candidate look bad.
The Biden crisis also exposes the risks of developing audiences that can’t differentiate between critical-but-fair journalism and ideological media that primarily serves a political party. Playing on audiences’ political views can be useful in the short term — for, in particular, driving subscriptions, the new lifeline for American news media — but clearly can result in some angry readers and subscribers when you tell them what they don’t want to hear.
Still, some media outlets with overwhelmingly left-leaning audiences have also found that they’ve been rewarded for taking on Biden’s age concerns, even if there’s some frustration among die-hard Biden supporters.
In an interview this week with Semafor, Pod Save America cohost and Crooked Media co-founder Tommy Vietor said that while the hosts have taken some flak from fans, their audience numbers have actually increased, as left-leaning listeners turn to them to make sense of the current situation.
“For a long time, the race was kind of calcified. But 50 million or more people tuned into the debate, and so I think since that time, just general interest in this election and what’s happening has dramatically increased. So we’re seeing numbers go up in terms of downloads and YouTube views and audience[s] generally tuning in and paying attention.
He continued: “There are definitely some people who are furious and will say, ‘I’m unsubscribing, I’m never listening again.’ There’s a woman who called us all traitors. There are people who somehow have decided that criticism of Joe Biden is racist or sexist. I’m not sure how you get yourself to that place.”