Like only the most courageous columnists have the mettle to do, I will offer a bold prediction for the presidential campaign: Republican presidential candidates will complain about the coverage they get from the mainstream media. Come to think of it, Democratic candidates may also complain, but the real cries of outrage will come from the GOP side.
OK, maybe that's not so bold and courageous, because it happens in most elections. You usually see it when the candidate is behind, since claiming that the media are against you is a way of blaming someone else for your poor performance. Not that every candidate gets treated fairly, mind you. But the claim is almost inevitably trotted out when a Republican is headed for defeat; those of you who have been around a while might remember George H.W. Bush holding up a bumper sticker reading "Annoy the media: Re-elect Bush" at his rallies in 1992, to the strained cheers and laughter of the crowd.
Early though it might be, our current Republican contenders are already getting into it. Last week, Marco Rubio, after suffering through two New York Times stories about his personal life (one about him and his wife getting lots of traffic tickets and one about his rather erratic financial life), grabbed the mantle of media victim with both hands. Rubio's consultants told reporters that the "attacks" by the Times would give the senator a boost with conservative voters, while his campaign sent out an alert to his supporters under the headline "Elitist Liberal Media Strikes Again," asking them to "Sign this petition to let the liberal media know you won't be swayed by their attacks on strong conservatives like Marco." I'm guessing the "petition" will be delivered no farther than the campaign's email list, but the signers can rest easy knowing that they've struck a crushing blow against those elitists.
It isn't a mystery why Republicans enact this performance of faux outrage, particularly during the primaries, since the voters they're after are fed on a steady diet of complaints about the mainstream media. For a couple of decades now, those complaints have been a hallmark of conservative media, a core ingredient in the ideological stew they serve their audiences. Over and over, people who watch Fox News or listen to conservative talk radio are told that they can't trust any mainstream, purportedly objective news organization. Anything they hear from The New York Times or NBC News or NPR is not just infected with liberal bias, it's crafted that way intentionally by the people who produce it, engineered to harm Republicans, boost Democrats, and foist upon them a poisonous liberal worldview opposed to everything they hold dear.
In fact, there may be no more pervasive and oft-repeated theme in conservative media. The idea of liberal media bias works its way into conservative media discussion of almost any issue, no matter what it is. Obama's foreign policy is a failure-and the media don't want you to know it. Raising the minimum wage is a terrible idea-but that's not what the media tell you. The Affordable Care Act is a failure-but you can only learn that by listening to us and tuning out what the liberals tell you through their news outlets.
There's been some discussion on the right lately about whether the media bubble so many conservatives inhabit does them harm, by narrowing their worldview and convincing them to hold to even wrong beliefs long after a more objective assessment would reveal the truth (the way so many Republicans were convinced Mitt Romney was headed to a sweeping victory right up until Election Day 2012 is just one vivid example). The problem isn't just hearing only one set of opinions-you can get plenty informed from a one-sided discussion. It's that a core part of the "liberal media" argument is that everything you hear from a non-conservative source is a lie. If you come to believe that, you begin to discount even facts that don't serve to advance your position, and your view of the world gets more and more distorted.
What many on the right also have trouble accepting is that while the news is full of biases, ideological bias is among the least important. Let's look, for instance, at the article about Rubio's traffic tickets. Did the Times publish it because Marco Rubio's a conservative, and they want to destroy him? No. They looked into the story in the first place because of a bias that says that what's most important to know about a candidate is what's personal and out of the public eye. They were surely hoping for something dramatic or shocking in the records, because that's another bias, reasonable or not: "Politician Obeys Law, Is Good Citizen" doesn't exactly make copies fly off the newsstand.
In the end, there wasn't much there-17 traffic tickets over the course of 18 years, or around one a year. Even more importantly, it seems to be Rubio's wife Jeannette who has the lead foot (13 of the tickets were hers). And unless either one of them has actually mowed anyone down, it probably doesn't tell us anything relevant about Rubio's fitness for the presidency. But another bias led to the publication of the story: Once they invested the time, money, and effort into reporting it, they were going to put it in the paper even if it wasn't all that consequential.
The story about Rubio's finances was more complex, but even there, the connection between what it revealed and the office Rubio is seeking is tenuous at best; as I've argued elsewhere, if you want to know what kind of fiscal steward Rubio would be, you should look at the economic plans he's already released, not the fact that he bought a boat he couldn't afford.
But no one who thinks about the news media in a serious way could believe that articles like these are driven by an ideological bias. If that were the case, then the Times would be giving Hillary Clinton a free ride, and they've done anything but. Indeed, while I haven't gone through the paper's archives dating back to its founding in 1851, I think it's safe to say there are few if any politicians who have had more critical articles written about them in The New York Times than Bill and Hillary Clinton. Some of these have been perfectly justified and others have been deeply problematic (the paper's original Whitewater reporting, for instance, was riddled with errors), but no one could accuse the Times of pursuing the Clintons with insufficient zeal.
That goes for the rest of the media as well; whatever you think about Hillary Clinton, she's hardly a favorite of political reporters. And the political media has done plenty to elevate Marco Rubio from an ordinary first-term senator into a legitimate presidential contender. So here's another prediction: Over the course of this campaign, the Republican candidates, both the eventual nominee and the also-rans, will receive some positive coverage and some negative coverage. They'll ignore the former and cry about the latter, claiming that the media are out to get them. And while some in that very media will react to their complaints by saying, "Ooo, clever strategy!", we ought to remember that attacking the media may give Republicans a good feeling, but it never convinces anyone to vote for them.
