The Political Function of Commentary

Democrats don’t seem to understand how the press works. This year news media published so many headline stories about Biden’s age it drove him out of the race. Yet there’s no evidence he wasn’t doing his job properly. In fact, at the very time of the disastrous debate with Trump, he was negotiating a complex, multi-nation deal to get American hostages released from Russia. By contrast, Trump shows signs of rapid cognitive decline, but news media seems indifferent. Why?

Democrats expect political reporters to investigate and convey the truth in a nonpartisan way. But political reporters only report what the candidates and campaigns say, and how these messages land with voters. Republicans started talking about Biden’s age as soon as he took office. They spent four years seeding this narrative in the press and the public mind. Democrats didn’t talk much about Trump’s age. Hence reporters treated the one as a major story, the other as a minor story.

The political press doesn’t report on ideas unless they’re already visible. Somewhere recently Obama pointed out that Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic killed 400,000 people. In fact, if the U.S. had managed COVID-19 as well as Germany, 400,000 fewer Americans would have died in the first year. As important as that information is, it’s too late to start talking about it three weeks before election day. There’s not enough time to build an audience so that the press will take notice before people vote. If Democrats wanted voters to be aware of this, they should have started talking about it four years ago.

This is a chicken/egg problem. Politicians don’t like to talk about ideas unless there’s already a constituency for them, but the press doesn’t take ideas seriously if politicians don’t talk about them.

It takes a lot repetition over years rather than months to make an idea visible to the press. This is the job of commentators. Right-wing commentators know this and echo any idea their colleagues throw out till they hit upon something that resonates with a big audience.

Center and left commentators are virtuous and independent, trying to persuade the individual reader with facts and reason (see “Do You Want Your Ideas to Win or Not?”). In effect, the left takes a scattershot approach in which few of its ideas attain the visibility and press coverage that right-wing ideas routinely do, even kooky ones. As a result, Republican politicians with bad ideas seem plausible to the public simply because the press talks about them while Democratic politicians with good ideas appear dubious because voters haven’t heard them before.

Instead of talking about many ideas that don’t get far with the public, center and left commentators should talk about fewer ideas over a long period of time to build their visibility. That means being a little less independent and a little more cooperative.

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