Drew’s Receipts: Media Fails, July 15

Engaging Media Narratives

Florida is the worst state, facts be damned. We’ll never know who brought cocaine into Hunter Biden’s White House. Asians are the newest non-white face of white supremacy. And stop saying the economy isn’t great!

Those were mainstream media narratives in the last week or so. As usual, I’ve got the receipts.

“We got it wrong.”

“More People Actually Moved Out of Florida than New York or California in 2021” was briefly a headline on a prominent news site.

hahahahhaha pic.twitter.com/EI1jsH0j8T

— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) July 11, 2023

Then, Insider, formerly Business Insider, was forced to admit it had the numbers exactly backwards. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s freedom-loving approach to the COVID-19 pandemic actually helped make Florida the fastest growing U.S. state for the past two years.

“We Got it Wrong,” read the corrected headline.

Give credit to Insider. CBS’s “60 Minutes” still won’t acknowledge it was wrong about DeSantis’s handling of the pandemic.

Sunday’s @60Minutes ended with @Sharyn_Alfonsi reading comments about her shoddy hit piece on @RonDeSantisFL. She didn’t acknowledge doing anything wrong. ‘Some viewers, including a retired newsman, applauded the story.” #60Minutes pic.twitter.com/v5qEwT5PXc

— Brent Baker 🇺🇦 (@BrentHBaker) April 12, 2021

The White House Cocaine Mystery

“The leading theory remains that it was left by one of the hundreds of visitors”

After the Secret Service closed its investigation into who left a bag of cocaine in the White House, CNN scooped that it totally wasn’t President Joe Biden’s recovering crack addict son.

According to the report, which relied on two anonymous sources, “the leading theory remains that [the cocaine] was left by one of the hundreds of visitors who entered the West Wing that weekend for tours.”

Not convinced? As the media have already explained: Back off!

MSNBC’s @clairecmc: “Everybody needs to back off Joe Biden about this. He loves his son. Back off. It is OK for him to love his son & there’s nothing wrong with it. They have no evidence of any wrongdoing by Joe Biden & it infuriates me they’re using this .. against Biden” pic.twitter.com/r7Hj3hwt1m

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 20, 2023

Asian Americans and White Supremacy

“Militant co-conspirators with white conservatives.”

“As the death of affirmative action showed, Asian American conservatives are active, militant co-conspirators with white conservatives,” writer Promise Li argued in the Nation.

But we must be clear about one thing: Asian American anti–affirmative action activists have not been simply “used” by white activists and duped into this white supremacist policy. They are active, militant co-conspirators with white conservatives. They are building a key flank for the right wing across the nation, and the left must urgently recognize that right-wing politics precisely gain power by recruiting conservative ideologies among communities of color that overlap with, but retain distinct aspects from, white supremacy. …

These Asian Americans are those who feel most at ease with the paradigm that Claire Jean Kim observes in her theory of “racial triangulation,” which characterizes how Asian Americans have long been recruited into functioning as a “model minority” to reinforce the structural oppression of Black people and the privilege of white people. Despite the fact that they cannot fully assimilate into whiteness, certain Asian Americans do enjoy privileges in Kim’s framework. Indeed, as she wrote in The Nation, “It is the convergence of this nascent, conservative Chinese immigrant nationalism with an older, conservative white nationalism that is driving anti–affirmative action politics today.”

The media’s big tent of white supremacy just keeps getting bigger.

. @Erika_D_Smith wrote a columm on Larry Elder that went viral earlier in this election. It warns that Elder is the “Black face of white supremacy”https://t.co/YBXzicjMJ3

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) September 15, 2021

The Rise of Latino White Supremacy | The New Yorker https://t.co/wL7jJ3XRLd

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 30, 2023

Inflation and Biden’s Victory Lap

“White House Takes a Victory Lap”

Joe Biden gloated after getting some of the best inflation numbers of his inflation-plagued presidency, and the media were here for it.

June’s CPI shows inflation has dramatically plunged from its peak, suggesting the end of a crisis that dragged down Biden’s approval rating and gave Republicans political ammunition for nearly two years. https://t.co/ucqFBOUXCc

— Axios (@axios) July 13, 2023

The resiliency of the US economy is defying expectations — and the odds of a ‘soft landing” are improving, said Lael Brainard, President Biden’s top economic adviser https://t.co/NLoHrjvL2T

— CNN (@CNN) July 12, 2023

White House takes a victory lap after inflation report comes in cooler than expected https://t.co/Nuwd6SvRna

— CNBC (@CNBC) July 12, 2023

Adding context to the coverage would have just been a downer. So what if almost 7 in 10 Americans are unsatisfied with the economy and Biden’s handling of it?

.@PuckNews‘ @WilliamCohan runs cover for the Biden economy: ‘I don’t have an explanation for why people think it’s bad because objectively, it is good. It’s hard to imagine it could be much better … People like being unhappy about a lot of things in America right now” pic.twitter.com/431SWhUfP4

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 13, 2023

That’s enough media for now. See you next week.