The press must have its horse race! Eric Boehlert:
“This year’s not-so-dirty secret: The campaign press desperately wants to tell an exciting election season story. Journalists like to create storylines, tension, compelling characters, and relay wild plot twists. More excitement means a larger audience —the press wants a horse race because it’s way more entertaining. And for most campaigns over the last 25 years, the media have been blessed with lots of nail-biting and historic battles. Not so much in 2020, where the contest has remained locked in a stubborn holding pattern, and shows no signs of budging soon.
“For all of this year’s upheaval, the race has stayed relatively stable, with Biden comfortably ahead in national polls,” Politico recently conceded. “The fact is the presidential race is kind of boring from a polling standpoint right now,” added Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.”
I’ll take boring over chaos and outrage any day.
There was a piece in the Atlantic worrying that the media hadn’t learned the lessons of 2016. I disagree. It seems to me that the pathology in the media now is that they most emphatically did learn those lessons: that giving Fergus everything he wants and more is wildly profitable.