The Myth of the Informed Liberal

Gazing Through the Keyhole of "Reliable Sources"

In late June 2024, the liberal intelligentsia were shocked and appalled to view highlights (or lowlights depending on your point of view) from the US Presidential debate, where incumbent Commander in Chief Joe “Sharp as a Tack” Biden showed any remaining doubters that he is, in fact, a doddering old man floundering in senility. Yet strangely, reports of Biden’s declining mental state in the Wall Street Journal mere weeks before the disastrous debate were brushed off at the time as ‘Fake News’, to say nothing of similar reports dating back years. As Timur Kuran put it:

Even as hardly a day passed without new video clips showing a disoriented and frail Biden, Democrats, aided by swaths of left-leaning media, rushed to dismiss the clips as taken out of context, or as misleading because of the cameraman’s perspective, or as malicious misinformation. They would also vilify the producers and spreaders of the videos as MAGA villains out to destroy democracy. In no uncertain terms, qualms about Biden’s age or cognitive capacity were treated as unwelcome, even as a betrayal of democracy itself.

CNN’s (ironically named) “Reliable Sources” ended up publishing a not-quite-apology titled “Biden’s mental fitness could have been better covered leading up to the debate, some White House reporters acknowledge.”

Not long previously, the aftermath of October 7th similarly blindsided many liberals when they discovered many of their fellow travelers on the left were unrepentant antisemites, as Niall Ferguson noted:

After the pogrom carried out by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, elite university campuses erupted with protests that in many cases were pro-Hamas or overtly antisemitic. Some of the world’s most brilliant investors were shocked to discover that the elite colleges they have been supporting with their hundreds of millions of dollars have enrolled or employed a substantial number of leftists whose “progressive” views include variants of antisemitism. 

The recurring spectacle of “liberals suddenly discover something conservatives have been saying for years” is all the more incredible for the fact that Liberals pride themselves on being so very well-informed about politics. This creates (or at least should), an uncomfortable paradox for liberals - how exactly is it that the ostensibly most educated, enlightened, intelligent, and informed people on the planet are so frequently the last to hear any news that could reflect badly on the left? Why are liberals just learning now what those “low information voters” on the right have apparently known all along?

Media Accountability: An Oxymoron

Robert Conquest famously argued in his three laws of politics that “any organization that's not explicitly right wing will sooner or later become left wing.” That has certainly proven true in the case of journalist media, which has become largely bifurcated along partisan lines. While liberals consider it culturally commendable to follow news closely (and political news in particular), following Fox News or any right wing media is considered gauche at best and deplorable at worst.

Ruy Teixeira

over at The Liberal Patriot coined the term “Fox News Fallacy” to describe this version of head-in-the-sand liberalism:

The Fox News Fallacy is having a dire effect on many Democrats. This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue. If there is something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, you will not allay those concerns by embracing the Fox News Fallacy. In fact, you'll probably intensify them by giving such voters the impression that Democrats simply don't care about their concerns and will do nothing to address them.

The strong liberal preference for getting their news exclusively from ‘intelligent’, ‘sophisticated’ outlets like CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Vox has lulled them into a complacent habit of having their own biases spoonfed back to them in the guise of news, as Quillette summed up well in the case of Vox:

“Vox would soon become famous for a style of journalism known as the ‘explainer’”

“Vox’s trademark style would be a cheeky, barely concealed smugness that flatters its readers into believing that by reading the website—which, not coincidentally, would sustain all of the liberal opinions that affluent, educated people already hold—they can rest assured that they are among the ranks of the correct, the informed, rather than one of the stupids.”

“The confusion of having an elite, educated status with having information, facts, and knowledge should by now be familiar—it is a move that journalists have made repeatedly to capture a high-end market and then clothe that market-driven decision as a journalistic value. But Vox took things one step further, leaning deeply into the view that reality itself has a liberal bias—one that incidentally appeals to and protects the status of progressive elites.”

“The Vox gambit was to bet that there were millions of readers like [Ezra] Klein, part of an educated meritocratic elite, who liked intricate policy discussions so long as everything they encountered confirmed their previously held beliefs.”

The combination of sanctimony and confirmation bias that began in online leftie outlets like Vox spread like mostly peaceful wildfire throughout the journalistic landscape in the George Floyd era with the rise of “Moral Clarity”, which is essentially a post-hoc rationalization for media outlets doubling down on progressive bias and groupthink. Freddie De Boer touched on the issues with “moral clarity” in a piece discussing the laptop of one Hunter “10% to the Big Guy” Biden (another story that liberals were the last to learn was true) and the Twitter Files:

“Immediately, in 2020, the enforced consensus within media was that there was no story to speak of regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story; it was not only not worthy of influencing the election, it should not have been reported on at all, and Twitter’s decision to artificially limit its spread was justified. So too with the Twitter files: as soon as Matt Taibi started tweeting about them, it seems, most in newsmedia were convinced they were unimportant.”

“If this had been Eric Trump’s laptop, how would our media have responded? I will remind you that this was 2020, a year in which vast swaths of the journalist class declared explicitly that the era of journalistic objectivity was over.”

“Wesley Lowery’s viral “moral clarity” essay in The New York Times, which stated flatly that in a post-George Floyd world, journalists no longer had any duty to appear evenhanded and instead were compelled to speak from a position of moral certitude…received a rapturous response from Lowery’s peers. It was a new day. Masha Gessen gave Lowery’s piece their blessing, saying we were experiencing “the emergence of a new political consensus,” ensuring that both the country’s most prestigious newspaper and its most prestigious magazine had endorsed the concept that media neutrality was a thing of the past. Quickly enough, many of the self-same people in media who had publicly embraced this new day promptly forgot about it, in order to again insist that there is no liberal bias in media.”

“If you think that Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss are the wrong people to cover that story, perhaps you should ask yourself about the social-professional conditions in media that have created a caste of outsiders who are the only reporters that many people trust. Perhaps you should think about cratering public trust in establishment media.”

At no point in the aftermath of the Biden debate, campus antisemitism, the Hunter laptop, or any other scandals did liberals en masse pause and reflect “wow, we sure are forgiving when our preferred media sources make us look like idiots over and over again”. Ultimately, you get what you incentivize, and liberals have given their choice of media little incentive to get quicker at covering unflattering stories. Fool me once, shame on you, but how many times now have liberals been fooled by their own media?

Liberals Learning Last (a few more times)

For an even more clear case study in how “moral clarity” works in practice, look no further than how NYT journos like Apoorva Mandavilli covered the possibility of Covid originating in a lab leak:

Journalistic takes steeped in moral clarity rather than objectivity have a tendency to age like milk, and don’t exactly help the media salvage their credibility among normies:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html

The left-wing obsession with “misinformation” as the source of all their ills just added another layer of impenetrability to their information bubble. In addition to lab leak, liberals were similarly the last to find out that yes, myocarditis is a known side effect of Covid vaccines (not to mention that those same mandated vaccines didn’t actually prevent infection or transmission). Similar to those supposedly “resilient” schoolchildren still suffering from learning loss, Covid-era liberals repeatedly rushing into erroneous conclusions is something conservatives intend to never let them live down.

Multiple heart surgeries later, I personally wish I’d been more of a conspiracy theorist sooner

Other Covid-era liberal beliefs that didn’t exactly withstand the test of time include Defunding the Police totally wouldn’t lead to a crime wave and BLM totally not being a scam and it’s racist to imply they might be.

Even after the various Covid/George Floyd debacles, liberals still seemingly haven’t learned anything and continue to be fooled for long stretches of time by their chosen media outlets. Meanwhile, alternative media like The Free Press is continuing to make hay off mainstream media’s better-late-than-never approach to getting the facts right:

Two years ago, CNN was here with the fact check, saying that folks who think the government hands out crack pipes are nuts! But two years is usually the amount of time that passes before “fake news” can become “common knowledge.”

Now The Washington Post is here, begrudgingly, with the follow-up. 

As Biden (or his handlers) took over the White House in 2021, other liberal beliefs spoonfed by the media that remained unquestioned for years included the border being secure and Build Back Better being a great idea, as printing ungodly amounts of money posed no inflation risks and any counterindicators were merely ‘transitory’. Joe Nocera has more examples if the pattern still isn’t clear.

In Canada, it similarly took years for liberals to internalize the realities that immigration is unsustainably high and those alleged mass graves were a myth. The CBC’s credibility is in well-deserved freefall, for which liberals blame those mean pouncing Conservatives, another wellworn example of liberal cope.

Rise of the Right-Wing Truthseekers

The liberal tendency to be the the last ones to find out about anything that could conceivably make their team look bad has proven to be a potent advantage (not to mention lucrative business opportunity) for conservatives, particularly of the populist variety. On issues ranging from immigration, to housing, to inflation, to crime, to addiction enablement, to all things transgender, conservatives have a tremendous first-mover advantage. They can be first to pitch voters on their solutions to problems because unlike liberals, they’re not wasting years denying those problems exist while smearing anyone attempting to address those problems as a deplorable bigot and/or Threat to Democracy Itself.

The political ascendance of populism can be largely attributed to widespread frustration with years of governance guided by the virtue-signaling political priorities of ivory-tower liberals, who are not only personally insulated from the consequences of their policies, but who subsist on a media diet that systematically curates into oblivion all feedback on how those feelgood policies are actually working out.

Now that the cat is out of the bag on Biden’s dementia and the untenable state of mass migration across the developed world, expect the next set of epiphanies for liberals to be on trans issues. We’re already seeing a gradual, stealthy walkback of previously held maximalist positions, as once again mainstream media is slowwwwwwwly beginning to report on scandals that have been well known for years outside the liberal bubble. Even then, the mainstream media is still omitting a lot, the Biden administration is still shooting the messenger, and Trudeau is still ride-or-die on the trans train. The next epiphany after the trans stuff will probably be that DEI is fundamentally anti-merit, anti-excellence, and a recipe for witch-hunts.

Even when liberal political parties reluctantly pull themselves to the center in time for elections, for many voters the sight of liberals belatedly waking up to reality is often too little, too late. It’s hard to blame them for being cynical; there’s not much to stop a party that pivoted towards moderation shortly before an election to then pivot back out to the fringe once the votes are in. Conservatives being first-movers on salient issues also gives them a credibility boost, as their overtures are seen as more than mere grudging lip service.

Populists are likely to keep gaining electoral share for as long as liberals stay in their safe-space media bubbles and reassure themselves “only deplorables care what Fox News et al is covering”. As long as liberals remain smugly oblivious to simmering discontent against their harebrained policies, and continue in blissful ignorance to support those policies well past their best-before date, those pesky conservatives will just keep on pouncing.