Biden has dropped out – is the news media accountable?

In July 2024, journalists and academics spent weeks complaining concerning the media's relentless coverage of President Joe Biden's age since his disastrous performance on the June 27 debate.

“The New York Times and others want Joe Biden go gently into the good night,” wrote Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism on the City University of New York.

“The scale and persistence of this editorial blitz means that the Times and all other media outlets that have followed it “We cause and cover up the pressure,” wrote Melanie Sill, former vp of Southern California Public Radio.

After relentless coverage of each his failing health and the pressure he faced from colleagues, donors and staff, Biden has now dropped out of the race.

This raises the query: is the journalists accountable?

“It really looks like Biden pushed out of the election campaign by the press,” wrote Dan Kennedy, professor on the School of Journalism at Northeastern University.

Dan Gillmor, former professor of journalism at Arizona State University, similar comments that the news media “played a central role in pushing him off the ballot.”

This line of considering assumes that the ability of the press is important and clear: when journalists report on a difficulty in a certain way over a protracted time frame, they ultimately influence people's opinions on that issue.

In reality, the influence of journalists is much more limited.

The (limited) power of the press

“Media effects research”, which, because the name suggests, refers to the various ways wherein individuals and society will be influenced by each news and entertainment mass media”, has long discredited the concept that people accept media messages passively and predictably – what’s often called “Model of “direct effects”.

Instead, media effects are more indirect in nature. One of those indirect effects is “Agenda setting,” The idea behind that is that journalists can increase the period of time people spend serious about a difficulty, but not how they feel about it.

“The mass media the agenda of topics for a political campaign,” write Maxwell McCombs, professor emeritus on the University of Texas at Austin, and Amy Reynolds, dean and professor at Kent State University. The media does this not by telling people what to think, but by telling them what to take into consideration.

When the New York Times decides to position an article on its front page, this decision implicitly legitimizes the subject as “newsworthy,” as Reynolds and McCombs emphasize.

There are exceptions. Investigative journalism that reveals recent information to the general public can actually change public opinion on a difficulty. Political scientists Frank R. Baumgartner, Suzanna L. De Boef and Amber E. Boydstun found that when journalists modified the way in which they create news stories on the death penalty within the United States to spotlight the likelihood that flaws within the criminal justice system could have led to the execution of innocent people, public support for the death penalty declined.

However, normally, drawing public attention to a difficulty and persuading the general public what to take into consideration that issue usually are not the identical thing.

For example, public opinion on climate change was fairly constantBetween 2016 and 2023, about half of Americans reported that they think global warming will “seriously threaten their way of life in their lifetime.” This consensus exists despite the incontrovertible fact that the number of stories stories about climate change almost doubled between 2016 and 2021.

The same goes for Biden’s age.

Polls show that folks have thought for years that Biden is too old to run again. This despite the incontrovertible fact that news organizations by and enormous didn’t report nearly as much on Biden's age-related issues before the controversy as they did afterward. Exception of The Wall Street Journal.

If the press actually had enough influence on public opinion, one would expect concerns about Biden's age to extend in parallel with reporting on Biden's age.

Instead, these concerns existed before the reporting. In retrospect, it seems as if the general public paid more attention to Biden’s age than to the Journalists charged for reporting on him.

Journalistic modesty

This discrepancy between what the general public thinks and what journalists do is consistent with my very own research in the connection between journalism and the general public, which suggests Influence of journalists concerning the people they need to succeed in is way lower than is mostly assumed.

As someone who studies the connection between journalists and the general public, I actually have found that journalists often struggle with regards to Dealing with the general publicThis commitment ranges from in search of more input from the general public, involving the general public in support the news through subscriptions, donations or memberships in news organizations to easily within the competition for public attention in an increasingly overwhelming media environment.

Taken together, these limitations suggest, in my view, that journalists can never fully understand or control the behavior of their audience.

It seems less likely that the coverage alone caused Biden to finish his campaign. The coverage clearly got under his skin – within the weeks following the controversy his criticism of the press caused an eerie echo the media villains that the country is used to from Trump.

But it’s more likely that Biden's frustration together with his reporting had less to do with the journalists than with their accurate reporting.

Contrary to the complaints, I consider that journalists' reporting did less to influence the general public to alter their minds about Biden than it did to supply an accurate insight into the growing pressure he was facing to rethink his possibilities of success as a candidate.

Journalists are in a frustrating situation. Their industry is in financial risk for Decades. Most people don't trust them. Nevertheless, there’s a seemingly contradictory public opinion that journalists are a robust and influential ‘elite’.

I actually have written before that journalists – and the individuals who study them – should embrace what I call “journalistic modesty”, the acceptance that the way in which audiences take into consideration and interact with the news will at all times be, to some extent, outside the control of journalists.

Perhaps it will be helpful if people outside of journalism also accepted these limits of the press.