Like a psycho stalker ex, the media has been churning out a series of whiny articles complaining that they’ve been blocked by Republicans on social media.
The latest comes from NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben, “Republicans have long feuded with the mainstream media. Now many are shutting them out”.
Also, earlier by Danielle, “Republicans confront (or sidestep) abuse accusations against midterm candidates”.
The good news is that Republicans are going Amish on the media. It’s belated, but Republicans are discovering that there’s absolutely no value to cooperating with media outlets that their own voters are shutting out and that exist for no purpose except elevating the Left and attacking conservatives.
“Long story short: I heard back from the Democrats but not the Republicans. Phone calls, emails, Facebook messages – I didn’t hear back from anyone. The top Republican governor candidates posted no events, though their social media showed they were out, talking to voters.
And so, when I happened to catch the top two GOP governor candidates walking in an Oconomowoc Fourth of July parade, I ran to the end of the route to catch them.
I found former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch greeting supporters. A staffer who then stepped between us told me they knew I had been reaching out and that I should contact a communications staffer, to whom I had already reached out. He would get back to me, she assured me.
He did not. And a day later, at a publicly-advertised meet-and-greet for governor candidate Kevin Nicholson, a staffer told me I wouldn’t be allowed to even get tape of Nicholson greeting attendees.
The phenomenon is impossible to quantify, but many Republican candidates are showing that they don’t want – or need – to get their messages out via legacy media outlets. “
They can’t, for the most part, “get out their message” via the media.
The media sets its agenda items that it wants to ask questions about and these are usually…
1. Lefty agenda items, racism, global warming, inequity,
2. Attacks on the Republican candidates, e.g. have you stopped beating your wife
Republican candidates have to navigate all that and hope they can get in two seconds with their agenda item, e.g. I’m going to cut taxes
Many are realizing that it’s a pointless waste of their time and that collaborating with the media gets you nowhere and is actually more damaging than ignoring it.
Whose fault is it?
The media loudly denies that it’s biased, but if so, why is it Republicans who are the ones blocking access, not Democrats? If the media is evenhanded, why would one party, not the other, want to exit the game?
“You can’t trust those venues” is a long-standing argument from the Republican side — that legacy media has a liberal bias.
Trust numbers reflect this belief — just 11% of Republicans trust the mass media, compared to nearly 7 in 10 Democrats, according to Gallup.
The question of liberal bias isn’t something we can settle in a small section of one article, and coming from a legacy media outlet, a claim that we aim to be unbiased would inevitably come off to some as…well…biased.
But it is also nevertheless true that claims of liberal bias are themselves a political tactic.
So is the bias itself and so is dismissing the bias as a political tactic.
All of this may come off as a lament that some GOP candidates are making reporters’ lives harder. That is certainly the read of people like Ron DeSantis’ spokesperson when she tells reporters to “cry about it.”
But as more candidates have ostensibly public events and don’t allow people to tell the public what is said at those events, it raises concerns about accountability.
Accountability means the media as a referee. Nobody elected the media to that position and nobody would trust a referee who spends 90% of her time cheering for the Yankees, makes biased calls at every game, and then says that refusing to let her call the game reflects opposition to accountability.
Elected officials are accountable to voters. If the media wants to claim that it represents the voters, it had better represent the spectrum of voters rather than just the 11% of leftists.
The media chose to represent a leftist fringe. Those are the only candidates it should expect reliable access to.
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