Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
President Joe Biden talks to reporters before leaving Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to travel to Philadelphia for a campaign event, March 8, 2024.
From the outside, one would assume that Joe Biden and the Democrats should have a relatively easy election year. On the one hand, Biden has a lot of accomplishments to boast about—a big infrastructure package, low unemployment, strong wage growth, the biggest climate bill in American history, the most sustained effort on competition policy and labor rules in decades, and quite a lot more. On the other hand, Donald Trump is going to be spending much of the campaign on trial for his various crimes, as well as paying hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal penalties.
There’s just one problem: Not many people have heard about Biden’s legislative record. And incredibly, even fewer are clued in to Trump’s actions and plans for the country. As Greg Sargent points out at The New Republic, recent polling shows that large “swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term.” Kevin Drum has assembled polls showing just 41 percent of Americans have heard “a lot” about the E. Jean Carroll verdict, and a mere 26 percent have heard about Trump’s plan to destroy NATO. By contrast, 73 percent of registered voters somewhat or strongly agreed that Biden is “just too old” to be an effective president.
The reason for this is that there is a giant right-wing propaganda apparatus blasting Republican messaging into tens of millions of homes every day, which Democrats do not have. And in the case of the Biden age question, both the mainstream media and even some liberal outlets have reinforced the propaganda by obsessing endlessly about it themselves.
What to do? At the risk of sounding self-interested, I have an old-fashioned suggestion: Democrats need a party publication—a partisan journalism operation intended to put the party’s messages directly before the American people. It won’t be able to counter Fox News by itself, but it’d be better than nothing, and a better use of money than even more advertising.
History buffs have probably heard that party newspapers used to be common in the United States. But the relationship goes even deeper than that. As my colleague Paul Starr points out in his book The Creation of the Media, newspapers were intertwined with the very development of political parties. “America’s first parties, the Federalists and Democratic Republicans, had so little organization that it is misleading to suggest newspapers were generally subordinate to them,” he writes. “Rather, newspapers were the organizational base on which a more modern party politics began to take shape.” And this makes some sense: After all, communication is one of the principal facets of politics.
You might be squirming in your chair right now. Liberals tend to be fussy and precious about party propaganda, viewing it as something for dim-witted right-wingers. They want to get their news from “unbiased” sources like NPR or The New York Times. This might be why Democratic politicians try to get those publications to do their messaging for them, though they are endlessly disappointed.
There is a giant right-wing propaganda apparatus blasting Republican messaging into tens of millions of homes every day, which Democrats do not have.
It’s true that one would not want to utilize the Fox News technique of constant hysterical lying, or the Alex Jones method of hawking scam products to your brain-dead audience. But that kind of lunacy wouldn’t appeal to liberals anyway. More importantly, all media is biased and ideological in some way, NPR and the Times very much included. The “objective journalism” standard espoused by reporters like Peter Baker is ontologically impossible—all language is bound up with unavoidable ideological assumptions. Better to be open about one’s biases than pretending they don’t exist, which can make them worse. Indeed, the Times electoral coverage this cycle has been so appalling that it might end up being worse than 2016. For instance, a recent profile of the Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina did not mention the candidate’s history of quoting Hitler and denying the Holocaust.
Now, there are partisan media sources out there, but they either have a relatively limited reach or they are actively dying thanks to the implosion of the news media. Expanding that reach and providing some stability requires an institutional investment. And knowing exactly what the source is would be in a way more honest than a message filtered through an allegedly unbiased source.
What I’m envisioning is a fact-based publication with a liberal frame—some straightforward journalism, plus some formal party messaging, somewhat similar to the traditional split between reporting and opinion. You’d have a website, an email newsletter—if Dems have anything, it’s large lists of emails—and perhaps even a print product. You’d have some social media channels, obviously, but the main objective would be to build a direct connection to individuals and families rather than relying on things like Facebook under the control of mercurial billionaires.
If we were feeling ambitious, there is also an opportunity to replace some of the local coverage that has been devastated by Facebook and Google devouring the advertising dollars that used to support journalism. Obviously the party couldn’t put out a paper in every single town and city, but a few publications in strategic swing-state locations whose reporting has been wrecked by Alden Global Capital—northeast Pennsylvania or Detroit come to mind—would likely pay outsize electoral dividends. Ordinary people can hear about the Biden record while they are finding out what happened in the last city council meeting.
Given the amount of money sloshing around liberal politics, it is perplexing that nobody has done this already. As Michael Sokolove writes at The New Republic, during the 2020 cycle Democratic candidates in Kentucky, Maine, and South Carolina raised $94 million, $74.5 million, and $130 million, respectively, only to lose all three races. Now, these long-shot races weren’t under the control of the party leadership—they were as much fundraising grifts on naïve liberals as actual campaigns—but there is even more money at the top. The biggest outside group supporting Biden, Future Forward, raised $208 million in 2023. The Biden campaign, the DNC, and their joint fundraising committees raised $97 million just in the last three months of 2023.
You could do quite a lot of journalism for a tiny, tiny fraction of what the Democrats are going to spend on the 2024 campaign. Democratic candidates and groups spent $5.5 billion on the 2020 election, and this election will likely cost even more. A well-paid, medium-sized operation covering national politics could be run for $20 million or less; a decent regional one for a quarter of that. And that spending would likely be far, far more effective on the margin than yet more television ads whose prices have been bid through the roof by the very campaign spending itself. Heck, you could even defray some of the expenses by selling ads for liberal causes or companies catering to liberals.
Unfortunately, big donors tend to be laser-focused on tactics to win the current election rather than long-term strategies to build up liberal thinking and improve the reputation of the Democratic Party. It took many years for the investment in Fox News to pay off.
A recent speech from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger makes clear that he—perhaps unsurprisingly for a scion of multigenerational inherited wealth—is proud of his paper’s ludicrously anti-Biden slant and virulent transphobia, and will keep doing it. If it’s up to him, this campaign will center around Biden’s age, while Trump’s numerous extreme scandals and outright criminality—as well as his own advanced age and dissolving brain—will be carefully downplayed. If I were Biden and the Democrats, who implicitly elevate the Times as their counterpoint to Fox, I’d be looking to change that, and quick.
