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“When Centrists Lose, Corporate Media Blame the Left”

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JULIE HOLLAR, jhollar@fair.org@FAIRmediawatch

Senior analyst for FAIR’s Election Focus 2020 project, Hollar is available for a limited number of interviews and just wrote the piece “When Centrists Lose, Corporate Media Blame the Left.” It analyzes several major media articles and notes: “Though all of these pieces offered plenty of suggestions that the left wing’s vocal support for things like socialism, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and defunding the police cost the party seats in 2020, they failed to provide any actual data that might have helped readers evaluate the veracity of those statements.

“It’s an important point, because understanding Democrats’ lackluster performance should help guide their platform and messaging moving forward. But these articles aren’t shedding light on the data — perhaps because it would thoroughly undermine the anti-progressive framing.

“As the New York Times’ Jim Tankersley (10/14/20) reported just last month in an unusually frank assessment of the popularity of left-wing ideas, the right’s wall-to-wall attempts to bring down Democrats with the ‘socialist’ label haven’t been very effective, despite  [CNN’s Chris] Cillizza’s suggestion to the contrary. That’s in part because Biden and other centrists deny them so forcefully, but in part because ‘many of the plans favored by the most liberal wing of Democratic leaders remain popular with wide groups of voters, polling shows.’ Tankersley pointed to a recent Times poll that found 2 in 3 respondents support a wealth tax, 3 in 5 favor Medicare for All (including 2 of 3 independent voters), and even higher numbers support free college tuition.”