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The Legacy Media’s Double Blindspot
“Whoops! Did I do that?”
“Biden is Trump,” wrote Ed Kilgore in a shocking headline for the New Yorker this week, before adding one clarifying caveat to soothe the many progressive readers no doubt blinking in confusion: “(When it Comes to Popularity.)”
“Biden’s job-approval rating for the month of January was 41 percent, according to Gallup,” observed Kilgore. “Trump’s was 37 percent in January 2019; the slight lag might be attributable to that month’s lengthy government shutdown, for which Trump bore much of the blame.”
“In February 2019, Trump’s average approval rating bounced back up to 43 percent,” Kilgore continued in a frankly mystified tone. “Trump’s average approval rating for his entire presidency was 41 percent. Biden and Trump’s comparative ratings have been quite similar overall since the Democrat’s honeymoon period wore off in autumn 2021.”
Though Kilgore isn’t the first political columnist to notice that plenty of Republicans have come to loathe Joe Biden every bit as much as Democrats hated Donald Trump, Kilgore is perhaps the most prominent voice in the left-leaning legacy media to say so publicly.
“If you look at the internals behind these numbers, there’s a pattern that helps explain why such different presidents, dealing with wildly dissimilar political…