President Biden completed a five-day trip to

the

Far East, including a summit in New Delhi with leaders of the G-20 conference of developed countries, where a major international infrastructure project for India was announced, followed by a one-day visit to Vietnam, where he strengthened relations with that country as a bulwark against China.

You may not be aware of this burst of presidential energy if you are a reader of the news website Axios. On Saturday, with Biden’s trip in full swing, the site’s gloss on Biden’s activities was as follows:

“Joe Biden and Donald Trump are running dueling campaigns that make it look like they are in the witness protection program.”

Biden’s presidential duties and Trump’s legal battles limit their ability to campaign.

You can’t be too surprised with this vision from Axios, whose goal is to condense the news into compact nuggets that can be consumed whole during a commercial break in an NFL game. But two aspects of the report stood out.

One of these is the stubborn adherence to the “both sides do it” press narrative, in which every action by one party must be accompanied by a seemingly equivalent action by the other party.

Then there’s the youthful snarkiness of the report, which takes pains to point out that the “bonus” of Biden’s “policy-focused presidential trips” is that “the campaign doesn’t have to cover any costs.”

Of course: What better reason to take a four-day, 15,000-mile round-trip international jaunt than to save his presidential campaign a few bucks? (Does anyone doubt that if Biden were to skip the G-20 summit, Axios would wonder if his age had anything to do with him staying home?)

Finally, the age thing. Given the amount of attention this issue receives in the press, you would think this is the only important consideration there is.

It doesn’t matter that any of these candidates have been indicted for allegedly plotting to destroy American democracy. On both sides of that issue, by noting that “Biden’s presidential duties and Trump’s legal battles limit their ability to campaign,” as if they serve the public interest and undermine the political fight. the common good are just two sides of the same coin.

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So of course, at age 80, Biden is only three years older than Trump (77), and

seems to be more physically active

.

This type of reporting calls into question whether the political press is up to the task of responsibly covering what could be a historically crucial presidential election. In 2024, the race will not consist of two candidates with different but arguably sound policy ideas, but one whose commitment to public policy is clearly visible, and another whose disdain for democracy is evident.

As early as 1992, it became clear that reporting on the American campaigns was consumed by madness. That was the year, it may be recalled, when a major campaign issue revolved around George HW Bush’s unfamiliarity with a supermarket scanner. The nugget was exploited to portray Bush as an elitist who was woefully out of touch with everyday Americans, regardless of the fact that the episode was misreported from the start and

What

only corrected years later.

Since then, coverage of the campaign has only grown more baffling. That’s because politics for campaign reporters (and I’ve been one) is complicated and therefore boring. It’s much easier and

more

It’s exciting to boil each race down to who-is-for-today and who-is-behind the horse racing statistics left behind by the memes that allow reporters to portray themselves as knowledgeable insiders.

If a candidate’s team questions the veracity of the meme, you can always respond, “Well, that’s what your opponents are saying and you can’t blame us for reporting it.”

Every race since 1992 seems to have been reduced to a pre-massaged nugget. In 2000, Al Gore claimed he had “invented the Internet.” In reality, that’s not what he said, and in any case he had indeed played a key role in advancing the legislation and financing that made the Internet possible. Too bad for Gore: the meme became shorthand for the idea that he couldn’t be trusted.

In 2016, it was alleged that Hillary Clinton had used a private email server as Secretary of State, putting national security at risk. This was always a silly issue, but because Trump relentlessly pressed it, the press went along with it, even though there was much more evidence that Trump was the one whose behavior threatened national security.

This time, the age meme is accompanied by the claim that Americans are hopelessly polarized. As I have written before, there is no evidence for this, and plenty to the contrary. The truth is that Americans, often by supermajorities, support abortion rights and stricter gun controls.

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Biden’s economic initiatives are also so popular that Republican officeholders have rushed to break ground to take credit for projects funded by Biden’s 2021 infrastructure.

account

even though Republicans in Congress voted overwhelmingly against it.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which for the first time allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices and caps insulin prices for Medicare patients,

commissions that are clearly good for the consumer and are widely popular

passed without a single Republican vote in either chamber.

Still, the “polarization” meme is harder to kill than a television zombie. What’s worse is that the press and political commentators are equally blaming both parties for driving Americans apart.

Take a recent report from the American Political Science Assn., which claimed that race is the issue that divides Americans more than any other issue.

In the report’s foreword, Mark D. Brewer of the University of Maine claims that “today’s Republican and Democratic parties have evolved into a place where they emphasize differences, stoke fear and hostility, and stoke conflict.”

That’s a classic double-sided construction, but is it? Not according to the text of the report. There, one finds scant evidence that Democrats are “stirring up fear and hostility,” let alone “stirring up fear and hostility.”

to turn on

e-conflict.” Do they “emphasize differences”? Given that the theme of much democratic politics is racial and ethnic inclusivity and welcoming gender diversity, that cannot be true.

In the report itself, Zoltan Hajnal of UC San Diego writes that the Democratic Party publicly embraced “the fundamental goals of the Civil Rights Movement,” while the Republican Party, through its “Southern Strategy” to express white resentment of black rights in that region outside, “has given up on more than a hundred years of racist progressivism.”

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(Rather crudely, I thought, Hajnal attributes the Democrats’ commitment to civil rights to a desire to harvest votes “by giving blacks access to the vote.” Perhaps the Democrats simply thought that giving all citizens access to the vote was the right thing to vote. Do it.)

More to the point, Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins writes that because the Republican Party’s positions on policies like abortion, gun control, health care and infrastructure spending

walk

“contradicts the majority of public preferences,” the party seeks to “capitalize on identity-focused rhetoric that can motivate voters without offering them economic or practical benefits.”

Mason quotes the excellent political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson who noted that in order to reach the plutocrats and still win the elections, Republicans pushed deeper and deeper into … parts of the electorate where conservative economic policies failed stirred the passion of voters, but sowed division. identify did.”

That doesn’t sound like either side

S

are also guilty of stoking fear and hostility and inciting conflict.

Another popular meme in the political press is that the Democrats in Biden are saddled with a very unpopular standard bearer. This is another highly dubious claim favored by lazy political commentators.

As Kevin Drum notes, Biden’s approval (42%, according to Gallup) at this stage is right in line with Trump’s (42%), Obama (40%), Reagan (44%) and Clinton (46%). of their first terms. All except Trump went on to a second term.

The result of the press’ fixation on

the issue issues

of Biden’s age, despite his obvious ability to govern, is that public opinion will swing in Trump’s favor, even as some of Trump’s fellow Republicans have begun to question his fitness for office (not to mention the, he said, ‘legal battle’ as Axios would have).

The importance of the press in reporting fairly and astutely on the issues in general during the upcoming presidential election

election

is unavoidable. So far, its failure has become more apparent every day. Time is running out to turn itself around.