A New Cope

“Do the NYT editors really want a Republican victory in November?” author Joyce Carol Oates asked in a tweet Wednesday.

The answer, I suspect, is, er, no. A newspaper produced by and for America’s liberal intelligentsia likely does not want a boorish coup-plotting proto-fascist returned to power. For Oates to entertain the possibility, the evidence she has of a sudden right-wing shift inside the Times must be shocking and overwhelming, right?

The answer to that is also no. The “evidence” in this case turns out to be a single headline at the paper that was tweaked to place a slightly more negative spin on Joe Biden’s latest inexcusable giveaway to student-loan debtors.

It would be comforting to know that Oates’ overreaction was an isolated case of Very Online brain worms, but the social media outcry at the headline among the left was apparently loud enough to prompt the Times to tweak it again, removing a reference to Biden being “beleaguered.” Someday, perhaps, when the history of the 2024 election is written, scholars will point back to that copy edit as the moment the race was won and the slaying of the Trumpian dragon assured.

Absurd episodes like this one are happening lately among Democrats more often than you might think.

The sharpest observer of the phenomenon is statistician Nate Silver, who’s written about it in his newsletter and on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. On topics as far afield as Hunter Biden, immigration, cancel culture, the economy, and the president’s age, Silver has spotted liberals complaining that the media’s coverage is excessive, unfair, or both—and boosting the chances of a second term for Trump. The recurring comparison among them is to coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in 2016: The press helped Trump to victory once before by exaggerating the foibles of his Democratic opponent, they claim, and now it’s happening again.

Press coverage of Clinton’s scandal eight years ago really might have been the difference in that election, Silver allows, but extending that complaint to matters as salient as immigration policy and Joe Biden’s basic competence in performing his duties stinks of unseriousness and scapegoating. His term for liberals’ growing obsession with media bias is “The Big Cope”:

I define The Big Cope as the belief that Democrats would win every competitive election if only it weren’t for unfair media coverage. The cope extends both to the mainstream media coverage of the Indigo Blob and to social media, particularly Facebook, Twitter and more recently TikTok, which are often accused of promoting “misinformation”.

I’ve spent almost 20 years working in right-wing media. I’m familiar with The Big Cope.

To say that there’s always been an unhealthy element of Big Cope in the right’s obsession with media bias isn’t to say that that bias doesn’t exist. I myself have written thousands—literally thousands—of posts calling attention to journalistic malpractice at conservatives’ expense. The mainstream press reliably leans left, probably more so today than it did when I started blogging, given how higher-educated Americans like reporters have gradually drifted Democratic.

Examples of it are common enough that one can easily make a career in right-wing media of finding and publicizing such examples, many petty but some quite significant. It’s no exaggeration to say that rebutting the worldview of outlets like the New York Times is why right-wing infotainment exists to begin with. And here too the antagonism has probably gotten worse over time: As Republicans have grown more populist during the Trump era, their contempt for the effete “woke” establishment in corporate media has turned increasingly poisonous.

Because so much of the modern right-wing imagination has been preoccupied by media bias, blaming the press for electoral setbacks has become inescapable. Before Mitt Romney became a hate object for Republicans, it was conventional wisdom among conservative activists that the media had stacked the deck against him in 2012 to protect their darling, Barack Obama. The Candy Crowley debate incident, the distortions of his “binders full of women” comment, the idiotic harping on Romney’s “gaffes”—put it all together and the press had cost the GOP the election.

You don’t hear that argument from the right much anymore, admittedly. As conservatives like Romney have fallen into disfavor, the populist narrative of his defeat has shifted from blaming the press to blaming his own antiquated agenda and his elite disdain for “the 47 percent.” But even here, enough of The Big Cope remains to provide a sort of origin story for Donald Trump. It’s because Romney wasn’t more combative with the dastardly liberal media, the story goes, that the right was forced to turn to a preposterous yet pugnacious SOB in 2016.

When you’ve lost the popular vote in every presidential election but one for 30 years and worry about your party’s viability in a country that’s grown more racially diverse, it’s a great comfort to believe that the media is ultimately to blame for your failures. There’s nothing wrong with right-wing politics, policy, or personnel; they remain the choice of The People, America’s rightful governing orthodoxy. The GOP would win every election—if only we had a fair press willing to carry forth its message without endless liberal distortion.

It makes sense, then, that the right would require a Big Cope taking the form of incessant media-bashing. What’s interesting, and less obvious, is why the left suddenly requires one.

After all, they’ve done okay electorally lately, haven’t they? Democrats won the House in 2018, reclaimed the Senate and the presidency in 2020, and outperformed expectations wildly in 2022. They’ve walloped the GOP in special elections over the past 18 months and are more likely than not to win a House majority again this fall. And despite 86 percent of the country thinking he’s unfit to serve a second term, Joe Biden leads in the latest national poll by 4 points.

There’s not much in all of that to warrant a liberal coping mechanism. There’s not much either in how the media has covered Donald Trump. For all the hysteria about Times editors recklessly paving his path back to the White House, his greatest political liabilities have received something close to saturation coverage over the last three years. January 6 and the four criminal indictments filed against him are probably the two most discussed domestic political news stories in American newspapers since 2021. And Trump’s autocratic designs on a second term have gotten enough press attention that even Fox News felt obliged to ask him about it.

If it’s true, as Silver says, that liberals have descended into a Big Cope, what exactly are they coping with?

The answer begins with Joyce Carol Oates’ brain worms. The more voraciously a partisan consumes political news, the more grossly distorted his or her perspective on what will and won’t affect Americans’ votes in November becomes. Imagine believing that a mildly negative headline about Joe Biden in the New York Times, a paper that caters overwhelmingly to well-heeled liberals, is worth fretting about. It’s ridiculous. But to the Very Online mind, even the slightest shift in the front lines of the information war risks a catastrophic breakout and ensuing rout.

The truth is that most political news just doesn’t matter. That includes stuff that might plausibly be described as “big,” never mind ticky-tack turns of phrase in random stories.

Brain worms can explain only so much, though. The left’s Big Cope is also a reaction to the balkanization of political media.

Republicans would nod along with that, I think. Their version of what’s happening here would go something like this: Thanks to Fox News and the internet, liberals have lost their post-war monopoly over news. No more can Walter Cronkite and the big three broadcast networks tell viewers at 6:30 p.m. how to think about events at home and abroad. Those days are gone and are never coming back, and the left is beside itself because of it.

There’s something to that, but it’s hard not to notice that Democrats have done conspicuously well in national elections in the internet age. To find a time when Republicans somewhat reliably won the popular vote in presidential races, you need to look back to the pre-internet era of Dan Rather and, uh, Walter Cronkite.

I think the Big Cope has less to do with losing a monopoly over news than with anxiety at how right-wing media has abused the influence it gained after that monopoly ended. The ideological bias and strict informational gatekeeping practiced at Republican-friendly news outlets is so extreme as to have become a subject of ridicule for its own heroes. “He said at some point he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote,” Ron DeSantis said of Trump on a conference call with campaign donors on Wednesday. “Well, I think he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and the conservative media wouldn’t even report on it.”

That’s barely an exaggeration. Modern right-wing media promises its consumers a “bespoke reality” in which information that challenges their worldview is either spun or ignored. Liberals might be able to live with losing a monopoly over the news, but increasingly they’re losing the ability to even communicate inconvenient facts to voters on the other side. To this day, despite all available evidence, a majority of Republicans continue to believe Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win the presidency in 2020. It’s no mystery as to why.

“Bespoke realities” exist on the other side too, of course. Joyce Carol Oates didn’t get those brain worms about New York Times headlines by accident. But the fact that right-wing media has descended so far and so remorselessly into abject propaganda during the Trump era might understandably make liberals defensive—too defensive—about minor ideological sins committed by sympathetic media outlets like the Times. Their side says Trump won the election while our side is busy sneering that Joe Biden is “beleaguered.” How are we supposed to win this information war?

More than anything, though, I think the left’s Big Cope is a backlash to the fact that they really, truly might lose an election to Donald Trump. It’s unthinkable. And not only is it unthinkable, but in important and unusual ways, they’re powerless to change the trajectory.

I share their exasperation. It’s an unanswerable indictment of this country that not only would Republicans choose Trump to represent them again in a national election but that he looks increasingly likely to win. America will never recover from it, reputationally or otherwise. The pill is too impossibly bitter to digest.

In a normal election, there’d be no need for fatalism about it this early in the campaign. Nine months is a long time for good economic news to penetrate the public consciousness and boost the incumbent’s polling. 

But in this election, most of Biden’s big vulnerabilities are set in stone. The biggest, his age, will only get worse. The damage on immigration is probably also done, even if executive action to try to get control of the border happens soon. And his polling hasn’t improved lately despite Trump’s victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, which were supposed to be a wakeup call for sleepy swing voters. Democrats are now stuck with the president as their nominee no matter how unpopular he gets, unless he chooses to step aside.

They’re on track to lose to the mastermind of January 6, a man openly bent on “retribution” and challenging the constitutional order. It’s shocking, and even more shocking is how little they can do about it. So they’ve chosen to obsess about changing what they can—namely, how the two candidates are covered in the press. Browbeating the media for wrongthink in how it writes about Biden is their way of reassuring themselves that Trump can be defeated; all it’ll take is enough informational muscle being brought to bear in promoting the Democratic spin on, say, the president’s senescence, never mind your lying eyes.

It’s much nicer to think that the media could end up costing Biden the election than to face the unbearable fact that American decadence has reached such a point of civic corruption that half the electorate is okay with rolling the dice on Trump again. It really is a Big Cope.

In its strongest form, like Oates’ post, The Big Cope would even demand that the mainstream press abandon any pretense of objectivity and skew its election coverage overtly this cycle to assist the Democratic cause. This isn’t a normal election, the theory goes; an extraordinary threat requires an extraordinary civic response. “The media simply isn’t up to the task to report on a fascist movement in our country,” one party strategist complained recently when CNN dared to wonder whether Biden’s age has become a bigger liability than Trump’s indictments.

But that’s my point. Biden’s age probably is a bigger liability at this point than Trump’s criminal indictments. It shouldn’t be, but our quarrel on that point isn’t with Anderson Cooper or Jake Tapper. It’s with American voters who by now are very well aware of who Trump is and what he’s capable of—and who seem to prefer him anyway.

To our liberal friends who dream of a more openly partisan mainstream media, I would say this: Be careful what you wish for.

The American right craved a formidable openly partisan media of its own and, thanks to Fox and the internet, eventually got one. The industry they’ve built is now so insular, paranoid, and propagandistic that the mainstream press ironically isn’t a sinister enough institution to play the boogeyman as much anymore in their narratives of political repression. Republicans have moved on from the liberal media to foreign vote-rigging cabals and “the deep state.”

It would be strange for more respectable news outlets to begin emulating them, or at least more so than they already have. If nothing else, doing so would function as a recruitment drive for corrupt right-wing media organizations. The more biased the mainstream press becomes, after all, the more reason Republican voters have to seek “friendlier” news sources.

Besides, abandoning civic norms in the face of some urgent threat is not a shrewd precedent to set with an authoritarian movement poised to take power next year. The entire story of the right over the past decade, particularly its defenses of Trump, is that there’s no form of unethical behavior that can’t be justified in the name of “saving the country.” If that’s the story of the left going forward as well then all we’re doing in elections is choosing which flavor of authoritarianism we prefer.

But I shouldn’t be too hard on them. For most liberals the Big Cope is, I suspect, exactly what it sounds like: not a serious call for the press to aggressively skew its political coverage, but a means of coming to terms with the fact that the result in November is likely to change our collective view of our country forever. Trump is what America is now; we all cope in our own way.