Glenn Youngkin ought to stand up and thank the liberal legacy media for his victory. The Republican may never have beaten Democratic former governor Terry McAuliffe had it not been for major outlets dumbly insisting that school parents weren’t actually upset about everything the educational establishment was doing to their kids.
McAuliffe, by all appearances, believed the media giants and behaved as if the uprisings against failing, dishonest, and ideology-overrun school boards were some sort of fake, astroturf Fox News mirage. And thanks to that out-of-touch arrogant belief, McAuliffe persisted in running against school parents. That may have been his fatal mistake.
Taking 2-3 weeks to respond to the education attacks = major self-inflicted blunder by McAuliffe.
This week’s Monmouth poll showing increased salience of issue + swing to Youngkin advantage says it all. https://t.co/b4PpsswtFo
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) October 22, 2021
McAuliffe in a Sept. 28 debate stated, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Regardless of the precise context, this was in the context of parents upset over school districts going 100% remote for an entire year, teachers peddling race essentialism, school libraries carrying pornography, and gender ideology being taught as fact.
The Biden administration tried to back McAuliffe by looking into parents who were too rowdy or heated in their criticism of local school boards. The National School Boards Association put out propaganda against angry parents, accusing them of “domestic terrorism” and using as the poster-dad the father of a girl who was, according to prosecutors, raped in a public school.
Despite all of these obviously legitimate grounds for anger about public schools, the national media treated it as all faux outrage. When the media reported on parental anger, academia’s media critics were furious that the parental fury was treated as real:
An @AP report on school board members quitting that never even hints that the chaos and hostility at board meetings is mostly whipped up by the right wing and entirely related to its fantasy wars against mask tyranny and race theory. https://t.co/eU6zjo1xtF
That is malpractice.
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 24, 2021
1. The sudden interest in school boards is not an organic grassroots movement of angry parents.
It is an effort orchestrated by seasoned right-wing political operatives who have formed a constellation of well-funded groups.https://t.co/NPlUwraJC6
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) October 14, 2021
And many parts of the liberal media followed suit. They instituted a media blackout on the sexual assault charges in Loudoun County. Their authoritative voices blithely declared that it was all Fox. Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump stated that there were no real grounds for grievance, merely Fox brainwashing. The AP ran a ridiculous fact check trying to claim that there was no establishment effort to demonize the parents.
In the Washington Post, the idea of “parental rights” was treated as a threat. Matt Welch at Reason magazine had a great piece on the whole media effort.
The media, of course, were all wrong. The anger was justified and real. And eventually, it showed up in the polls.
Youngkin leads by 15 points among voters who have children in a K-12 school. pic.twitter.com/QrrStaka8p
— Echelon Insights (@EchelonInsights) October 29, 2021
But the media bias mattered, because McAuliffe spent almost all of October defending his position that the problem with education today was that parents were too involved. Again and again, McAuliffe stated that. Why did he believe that? I believe he believed that because he reads the Washington Post and the AP and Jay Rosen and Judd Legum.
Having the news media as a yes man is dangerous.
I’m old enough to remember when the Washington Post decided that the main story in the 2009 gubernatorial election was that Bob McDonnell had written a master’s thesis about how women leaving the home for work might affect family life. The Post was literally obsessed with this and covered this as the central campaign issue for two months.
The Post convinced Creigh Deeds to start campaigning on the issue, which of course did him no good.
Having the whole news media on your side is often helpful — such as when Joe Biden enjoyed a media blackout on his son’s influence-peddling. But when it convinces you that issues matter that don’t, or that issues don’t matter that do, it’s a handicap.
