President Biden is dropping dark hints about America’s troubled news business.
“Everything’s changing, but the biggest change is taking place [in] the press…” Biden warned on a podcast last week.
He cited statistics showing that fewer people, particularly young Americans, read newspapers and watch mainstream national television news programs.
“Where do you get your news? And how do you know what you are getting is not just [an opinion] you are looking for as opposed to what [is really] happening?,” Biden said.
He painted a picture of Americans crossing a perilous sea of disinformation with no clear destination.
The result, he suggested, is increased division, because people now “pick what news we want to hear” — and watch and read, of course.
Biden’s words go beyond press criticism. The outgoing president is sending a distress signal about damage to the free flow of information putting at risk an essential element of democracy — an informed citizenry.
A broken media is about more than ratings, clicks, and advertising dollars. A broken media is a threat to the nation itself.
Polls show the political divide among websites, channels, and podcasts has led to a breakdown of public trust in major news organizations. The importance of accurate reporting based on hard facts has been submerged against the rocky shores of personalities performing “infotainment,” and rants of extreme opinions that include mockery of rival viewpoints.
The truth of Biden’s warning is evident in the fact that most news outlets are now defined by their partisan leanings.
Not long ago, being trustworthy, and a reliable provider of accurate information, was a sign of excellence in media. It is no longer a sure way to attract an audience.
That decline in the importance of trusted reporting has the impact of eroding any basic agreement among Americans about the most important issues facing the country and how to solve them.
“It is a totally different deal,” Biden told the podcast Pitchfork Economics. “We’ve got to figure out how we deal with this significant technological change. Where do you go? What is true? We have no evidence anymore … I think it’s a big deal.”
Yes, sir, it is a very big deal. That was evident in the 2024 presidential race.
Biden’s comments about the press are not getting much attention because his party lost the election. But it is a fact that false claims that Haitians are eating pets in Ohio made it to the debate stage. Outrageous conspiracy theories about election fraud in 2020 remain a staple on many news outlets. Sensational reports about crime abound, even though the data show crime, by historical measures, to be relatively low.
Ugly personal attacks — “trolling” — now have the power to distort political debate and the outcome of campaigns.
“When you turn on the television,” Biden accurately pointed out in a recent exchange with reporters traveling with him, “everything looks bad. Everything looks bad.”
He noted that a majority of Americans say they are succeeding. But two-thirds of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. Similarly, Biden’s approval ratings are low despite an economic record that is among the best in the world.
Biden is suggesting that disconnect is the result of the dim portrayal of American life in much of the media, especially social media driven by bad news.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign strategist, put it bluntly: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s—.” In today’s world of high-tech media available on every computer and every cell phone in every pocket, the Bannon strategy is accelerated by the premium put on celebrity.
This culture of celebrity politics is not new. In 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne helped his college friend Franklin Pierce win the presidency by writing “The Life of Franklin Pierce.” Books were the TikTok of that era, their influence limited only by the number of copies a printing press could churn out.
The overlap between politics and entertainment was satirized in “Wag the Dog,” in which a Hollywood producer stages a fake war to distract from a presidential sex scandal.
Trump blurred those lines further during his WWE appearances, wherein he played the hero in over-the-top fake wrestling bouts.
As Howard Beale declared in the 1976 classic “Network,” television “can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world. And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people.”
In 2018, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) joked that Trump might appoint Judge Judy to the Supreme Court. Given recent cabinet nominations, that no longer feels like a joke.
In the holiday spirit, I’ll end with cautious optimism. Perhaps Trump’s celebrity cabinet appointees will use their media savvy to expose corruption and inefficiency in government.
But as Biden uses his last days in office to sound alarms about the state of American media, I am concerned, even fearful, for a broken media’s impact on the nation’s future.
Juan Williams is Senior Political Analyst for Fox News Channel, a prize-winning civil rights historian, and author of “New Prize for these Eyes: the Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”
