Matthew Continetti‘s latest “Mediacracy” column for Commentary focuses on the mainstream media’s skewed reporting of 2014 elections.
[W]hile the polls might have misjudged Democratic numbers as recently as 2012, the polls in the 2014 election, like those in 1994 and 2002, misjudged the GOP. “This evidence suggests,” wrote Silver, “that polling bias has been largely unpredictable from election to election.”
Media bias, on the other hand, is remarkably predictable from election to election. It always favors Democrats—preferably liberal ones. Not only did Republicans in 2014 labor under the burden of skewed polls; they also had to compensate for a skewed media. And when the results came in, it was schadenfreude time. They may not have been on the ballot, but the media were among the biggest losers of 2014.
The press had championed Texas state senator Wendy Davis ever since her filibuster of a pro-life bill last year. Her looks, her life story, her wardrobe—all became subjects of praise. “Why Wendy Davis’s Iconic Shoes Are Newsworthy,” read a headline in the Daily Beast. And this was one of the milder things written about her.
Texas Monthly featured Davis on its August 2013 cover. She stood imposingly in between Congressman Joaquin Castro and his brother Julian, now secretary of Housing and Urban Development. “Can Wendy Davis, the Castro Brothers, and Team Obama’s vaunted field operation return their party to power?” the magazine asked. Last February, Davis appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. The question on the editors’ minds: “Can Wendy Davis Have It All?”
No and no. Money can’t buy you love, and love from the media can’t buy you victory. Davis lost to state attorney general Greg Abbott by 20 points.
As the election approached and chances of a Republican takeover of the Senate increased, journalists zigzagged from state to state, searching for the man or woman who would rescue the Senate from the clutches of Mitch McConnell. …
… To some extent, the floating liberal cheering section—in Kansas one week, in South Dakota the next, in Georgia, in North Carolina—can be explained by faulty polls that deceptively showed Orman, Pressler, Nunn, and incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan as competitive. Skewed polls contributed to skewed media.
But hinky polling does not explain the media’s devotion to storylines that the returns exposed as utterly spurious. …
… Another bogus storyline was that ObamaCare wasn’t a factor in the election. A writer for the Washington Post said in August that the health-care law was “not really a big voting issue heading into the final three months of the 2014 campaign.” U.S. News & World Report called the health-care law “the incredible shrinking issue.” The New York Times called the repeal of ObamaCare a “side issue.”
The Times piece led with an anecdote about Ed Gillespie, whose ObamaCare-replacement proposal has been widely praised. But, the Times said, “Almost no one took up the cause.” That depends on how you define “almost no one.” Enough people took it up to put Gillespie within striking distance on Election Day. Republicans ran more ads attacking ObamaCare than ads on any other issue in the closing weeks of the campaign. Every single Republican elected to the Senate supports repeal. Forty-seven percent of voters in the national exit poll said ObamaCare goes too far.
Republicans didn’t stop talking about Obama-Care. The media stopped listening. Their biases and parochialism were why they got the election entirely wrong. Losers.
