ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I wonder what sort of mushroom Jonathan Chait enjoyed before writing this.  " If you want to understand the strange difficulty that Joe Biden’s sane, competent administration has in yielding measurably higher approval than Trump’s insane, incompetent presidency, the asymmetrical relationship between the two parties and their respective media environments is the most important place to start."  I'm not sure how putting executive impedimenta on domestic oil exploration, then importuning the petro-states to pump more oil, or continuing to move the goalposts on the corona tyranny, or bugging out of Afghanistan, then importuning the new government, such as it is, to provide safe passage, give the impression of sanity and competence.  It's not enough to do stuff by the book, you have to understand what stuff has good effects, and what stuff does not.

So far, I have not encountered anyone working for this administration who acknowledges that there will be some difficulties, but patience will be rewarded with good outcomes in a year or three.

This is not necessarily to deny that the mainstream media has some kinds of liberal bias. It’s certainly true that, as the electorate has grown more polarized by education, the mainstream media’s near-total reliance on college graduates has made it much more socially liberal than the overall country. (One stark example of this bias was the stampede last year to dismiss the COVID-19 lab-leak hypothesis as a “racist conspiracy theory.”) For the sake of argument, I am willing to concede that this liberal bias outweighs other cross-cutting biases. I would simply maintain that liberal bias is not the only determinant of media coverage.

Above all else, it treats bad news as more important than good news. And so, while mainstream media often covers Republican presidents critically, it metes out the same treatment to Democratic presidents. For instance, the American media’s coverage of COVID — which a study found to be more relentlessly negative than coverage in almost any other country — probably hurt Trump, but now it’s hurting Biden.

The government's experts, during the final year of the Trump presidency and in the first year of the Biden presidency, have been consistently wrong in handling the pandemic. But where is the mainstream media voice suggesting that maybe the government should do less?  Their promotions depend on being able to present themselves as Shapers of Policy, and such a voice is unlikely to get much of a platform.