No Clothes

The media's narrative implodes

For the last few days, I’ve had the odd sensation that I watched a different debate than everyone else did. It’s not because I didn’t think Biden was terrible — he was clearly terrible — but because I expected him to be even worse.

My brother’s family came over to our house so we could watch the spectacle together, and had been listening to the beginning of it on the radio on the drive over. My sister-in-law showed up at our door with an expression on her face like somebody had just died. It was agonizing just to hear Biden talk, she said — and this was before she’d even been subjected to the visuals of Biden’s slack-jawed, dead-eyed, thousand-yard stare. “Really?” I responded. So far I’d actually been impressed, I said, that he hadn’t collapsed on stage or gone into a fugue state. I thought he was having an okay night.

It probably goes without saying that our expectations are largely a function of the media we consume. Before 2020, I got my news almost exclusively from The New York Times and the New Yorker, along with a half dozen left-wing online outlets. Everything started to change that year, as I watched a combination of Covid, George Floyd and Trump Derangement Syndrome transform millions of liberals into a weird, hysterical, reactionary secular religious cult. I began taking conservative reporting more seriously, and establishment media much less so. It was only a matter of time, however, before I became equally disenchanted with the “heterodox,” “IDW,” “post-left” subculture I’d fallen into, which has become less of an intellectual community and more of a TED Talks-style lifestyle brand. The right wing was even worse; especially since October 7, conservatives have become every bit as hypocritical as the woke left at the height of Black Lives Matter.

This wholesale disillusionment has left me in the paranoid position of assuming that every journalist is working an angle. Most of the time, that would amount to a lot of cheap cynicism, but it’s useful at the height of campaign season, when it happens to be true.