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Seven years ago, a competent Democratic presidential candidate ran against someone who was largely considered to be a joke. Pundits and major media outlets criticized Hillary Clinton<\/strong> for being \u201coverprepared<\/a>\u201d against Donald Trump<\/strong> while<\/a> obsessing<\/a> over a controversy<\/a> stemming from her use of a private email server. The word \u201cemail\u201d dominated<\/a> the political discourse when there was plenty to say about Trump\u2019s hostility toward democratic norms<\/a>, his failed businesses, and his love<\/a> of the Russian cutout WikiLeaks. Trump was treated as an amusing distraction and Clinton was treated as a fait accompli. But that was two impeachments, four indictments, one superseding indictment, and an armed insurrection ago. Surely, you\u2019d think, the mainstream media has learned<\/em> from its mistakes.<\/p>\n And boy, would you be wrong. On Sunday, in a rare, hour-plus sit-down with the former president, NBC\u2019s Kristen Welker<\/strong> proved once again that interviewing the 45th president is an impossible task\u2014even for a sharp journalist like her. Sure, she may have fact-checked Trump\u2019s lies in real time and peppered him with well-deserved criticism. But, as we\u2019ve repeatedly seen<\/a> in the past, good-faith pushback does nothing to stop the ex-president\u2019s falsehoods.<\/a> Like the house in a casino, Trump always wins\u2014and the mainstream media just keeps making bets<\/a>, seemingly desperate to turn 2024 into 2016.<\/p>\n What is<\/em> a bit different from the lead-up to 2016 is that Trump, despite his tumultuous absence from government, is now the de facto leader of the Republican Party. And for the most part, the GOP primary contest appears to be a pathetic competition for the vice presidency. (Chris Christie,<\/strong> at least, has the self-respect to openly condemn Trump.)<\/p>\n As for the Democrats, well, the party has an incumbent president\u2014which, in a normal world, would mean no chance of a primary. However, some in the mainstream media have bemoaned the lack of challengers to Joe Biden,<\/strong> even while expressing uncertainty around the idea. Jonathan Chait,<\/strong> in a piece arguing that Biden should be primaried, admitted that \u201cthere are four examples of incumbent presidents facing serious primary challengers, and none of those presidents went on to win reelection.\u201d And David Ignatius,<\/strong> in calling for Biden to drop out, conceded<\/a> that \u201cright now, there\u2019s no clear alternative to Biden\u2014no screamingly obvious replacement waiting in the wings.\u201d<\/p>\n Then exactly why, you ask, should Biden drop out?<\/p>\n Well, we\u2019re told he\u2019s too old. And while Biden may be two and a half years Trump\u2019s senior, you wouldn\u2019t know it by the looks of a recent AP-NORC poll<\/a>, which noted that the president is \u201cwidely seen as too old for office\u201d\u2014even if \u201cTrump has problems of his own.\u201d Problems of his own? Is that the multiple indictments or the civil charges? Google searching \u201cIs Biden too old?\u201d bears countless results. Meanwhile, search \u201cTrump is too old,\u201d and you\u2019ll get stories about Biden\u2019s age. Which raises the question: How much does writing about something make it real in the eyes of the electorate? If Hillary lost the 2016 election to \u201cbut her emails,\u201d could Biden lose 2024 to \u201cbut his age\u201d?<\/p>\n Age aside, you\u2019ll also hear that Biden is still just plain old unpopular. A lot of this comes from editorials and \u201cnews analyses\u201d that are based on polling. But if you\u2019ll remember from November, it was polling<\/em> that put Clinton ahead of Trump<\/a> by one to seven percentage points in the popular vote. It was polling<\/em> that told us there would be a \u201cred wave\u201d in 2022, whose nonexistence was summed up by the New York<\/em> Times<\/em><\/a> postmortem: \u201cThe skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media.\u201d And it was polling<\/em> that told us, even as far back as 1995, that Bob Dole would wipe the presidential floor<\/a> with Bill Clinton.<\/strong> But nearly 30 years later, like Lucy and the football, we are yet again treating junk polls as gospel.<\/p>\n Take, for example, a recent CNN poll, which consisted of 1,503 respondents who reflected<\/a> \u201can oversample of\u2026898 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.\u201d This poll was used as the basis of a New York Times<\/em> story, which proclaimed<\/a>, \u201cParty leaders have rallied behind the president\u2019s re-election bid, but as one top Democratic strategist put it, \u2018The voters don\u2019t want this, and that\u2019s in poll after poll after poll.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Now, it\u2019s worth asking how a poll like this even makes it into the paper of record. Well, it\u2019s simple: Republicans work the refs. By pushing the narrative that the mainstream media is left-leaning, they prompt anxiety-induced overcorrections from the press, which is utterly paranoid about the appearance of bias. That\u2019s why, as former top Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer<\/strong> writes<\/a>, we end up with a situation where false equivalencies are used: \u201cIn a desperate attempt at balance, the media is equating Biden\u2019s age with Donald Trump\u2019s criminal behavior emanating from stealing classified documents and trying to overturn an election.\u201d<\/p>\n But the most effective way Republicans work the refs is by leveraging their own opinion-based news. Fox News, which effectively functions as the propaganda arm of the GOP, picks up stories that Republicans don\u2019t like and tries to bully their authors\u2014like Taylor Lorenz<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> Brandy Zadrozny<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> and Lauren Duca<\/strong>\u2014into silence. Journalists of color are especially vulnerable: For example, Fox News\u2019 website has more than 3,000 hits<\/a> for \u201cJoy Reid,<\/strong>\u201d many of them involving supposed controversies like \u201cJoy Reid admits she was \u2018hesitant\u2019 of COVID vaccine<\/a> under Trump.\u201d The goal here is clear: to remove the friction that Republican candidates face by silencing a Black female host with a highly rated prime-time show.<\/p>\n This week, we can all expect Welker to go through the same media meat grinder for facing off with Trump. But to what end? Giving the public a \u201cbetter understanding\u201d of the terrifying autocrat<\/a> we\u2019ve all been watching for the past eight years? Trump, who has been lying for years about the last presidential election, no longer deserves to get the benefit of the doubt heading into the next one. And there is no reason for the media to give it to him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n