The national press has given us a glimpse of what its relationship with Joe Biden will look like should he win the White House in the fall.
The word that comes to mind is “subservient.”
Biden remarked in an interview this week that “unlike the African American community,” the “Latino community is an incredibly diverse community” — the implication being that the presumptive Democratic nominee apparently believes the black community is monolithic and single-minded in its thinking. Damaging remarks to be sure, ones that the Biden campaign itself attempted to clean up Thursday evening. But you would never know from following the news that the former vice president even said something potentially offensive about the black community.
The way national newsrooms tell it (the ones who even bothered to cover Biden’s remarks while they were still fresh, that is), he merely drew “contrasts” and “distinctions.”
“Biden draws distinction on Black, Latino political diversity,” reads the headline to the Associated Press’s first and only report on the interview.
Only for a Democrat would a news outlet so willingly bury the lead this deep.
“Biden faces backlash for comparing diversity in African American, Latino communities,” ABC News reported Thursday, choosing inexplicably not to quote anything Biden had said. NBC News similarly downplayed the former vice president’s remarks Thursday with a bland headline that reads, “Biden faces backlash over racial diversity remark.”
On social media Thursday afternoon, Politico marketed its own coverage of Biden’s comments thusly: “Joe Biden contrasted the Black and Latino communities in remarks on Wednesday, stating that the latter is ‘incredibly diverse.’”
What he said was that blacks are not diverse, but Latinos are.
CNN meanwhile mentioned Biden’s remarks on-air exactly once Thursday afternoon. The cable network did not revisit his comments in-depth until much later that day — after the Democratic campaign had already put out a “clarifying” statement.
But at least CNN, ABC, Politico, and the AP can say they attempted to cover the story when it broke. Others cannot say even that much.
CBS News, for example, did not touch Biden’s remarks until after his campaign put out a “clarifying” statement. MSNBC did not mention Biden’s comments once Thursday, according to media critic Steve Krakauer. The New York Times’s sole contribution to reporting on the incident has been to cross-post the Associated Press’s original reporting. The Washington Post likewise left coverage of Biden’s comments to the Associated Press, though the “Democracy dies in darkness” newspaper did publish an analysis that mentions in the 12th paragraph that the former vice president said the Latino community is more diverse than the black community.
The thing that is wild about this is: The Biden campaign itself put out a statement Thursday evening clarifying that the presumptive Democratic nominee does not, in fact, believe that black people all think alike. It is an implicit admission that the candidate screwed up. That is a news event, at least if a Republican does it. It should be news here, especially given the former vice president’s long history of disparaging, patronizing remarks about the black community.
But now that Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee and the White House is on the line, members of the national corporate press seem to have gone back to playing the role of the subservient lackey, softening stories that may potentially be embarrassing or damaging to the Democratic nominee — even if the Democratic nominee himself implicitly concedes the story is damaging.
If (or when) Biden wins the White House this fall, get ready to watch that great, brave, chest-thumping Fourth Estate lull itself back into a long, multiyear sleep.
