Thread by @joshtpm

I've explained this before. But in addition to a lot of frivolous and biased journalism the real root of a lot of what you see in the elite press isn't bias precisely. Certainly it's not that the reporters are right wingers or Trumpers. It's something different but insidious.

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1824834174919815316

2/ Precisely because the bulk of elite reporters and editors come from the same social and cultural world as Democrats they tend to view and report on Republican policies and campaigns as something like the weather. You can give people heads ups about Hurricanes and tornados ...

3/ so forth but you don't spend much time explaining that it's pretty mean for the air to create an cyclonic vortex which breaks peoples houses or major oceanic storms that cause billions of dollars of damage and drive people from their homes. It's the weather. It is ...

4/ what it is. We know this etc. Well, elite political reporters tend to see Republican policy and campaign work in the same way. The fact that they roll out fake policies and simply have organized lying as a foundational part of how they run campaigns ... well, no kidding ...

5/ what else do you expect? And there's a certain logic to that. What else *do* you expect. That's how they function. But as an assumed baseline reality that obviously has a fairly distorting effect on coverage writ large. That's not all their is of course. There's just ...

6/ frivolous and silly bad journalism. There's the structural and professional imperatives toward bothsidesism. And there's the way that conservatives have trained a couple generations of journalists to have fear of being called "biased" (always against Republicans, there's ...

7/ no other kind of bias) as a primary way of thinking about coverage. But this seeing what Republicans do as like the weather goes far deeper than most people realize. And it is paradoxical and in that way kind of hard to see precisely most reporters are if not 'liberal' ...

8/ then from a common cultural and social world as people who vote for Democrats. At a basic level Republicans are kind of other. But that doesn't have the effect that a lot of people imagine.