WaPo columnist complains media is ‘obsessed with not offending Republican readers’

A columnist for the Washington Post bemoaned how the rise of the publication Politico led to a media to be too tough on Democrats and too lenient towards Republicans.

On Tuesday, columnist Perry Bacon, Jr. published “How the rise of Politico shifted political journalism off course” where he wrote about the the news publication’s influence on the media. He noted that while Politico has risen to the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post, its popularity led to “a troubling development for consumers of American political news.”

More specifically, Bacon claimed that the Politico method was “obsessed with not offending Republican readers.”

“Politico largely embraced those prevailing orthodoxies of political journalism, particularly in its early days —it was Beltway-focused, obsessed with not offending Republican readers, sometimes resembled sports coverage and its leading reporters were nearly all White. It was in many ways just a faster, more interesting version of how politics had long been covered. And that really worked,” Bacon wrote.

Bacon elaborated that the media led by Politico “refused” to frame the GOP in unflattering lights when covering ongoing political struggles. For example, he claimed that mainstream press, “wary of angering Republican readers,” chose to ignore the “radical and racist behavior” of the GOP during the Obama years. – READ MORE