As of: March 15, 2024, 10:33 a.m
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US President Joe Biden.
© Steve Schaefer/Imago
Joe Biden spoke to 31 million viewers during his State of the Union address.
But he can hardly score points in the polls.
This is also due to media consumption.
Washington – A week ago, President Biden gave his State of the Union address.
She was well received;
his forceful arguments - many extemporaneous - were an effective way to allay even bona fide fears that he was physically or mentally frail.
Viewer polls showed the reaction was largely positive.
After his speech to the nation: Joe Biden is barely making any gains in the US election polls
The catch, however, is that State of the Union speeches have often not had a major impact on presidential approval ratings in the past.
On average, since 1988, approval ratings have risen half a point the week after a speech, and within a month any improvement has disappeared.
And in fact: Biden's approval rating is currently 0.3 percentage points higher on average in surveys than on March 7th.
Maybe that will change.
Perhaps the impact of the speech and Biden's post-speech visits to swing states will push these numbers up.
But here too, previous presidents have not improved much.
The State of the Union address is a pivotal moment in the political year - but one that simply does not reach, let alone appeal to, a large portion of the population.
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The question of how to appeal to Americans is of central importance to politicians.
Biden's administration has struggled to convey his successes in a way that keeps his approval rating positive;
his campaign - young but existing - did not consistently put him ahead of Trump in the polls.
Mainstream media is making life difficult for Biden
Many of Biden's allies or supporters see the mainstream media in the US as a point where this effort fails.
Headlines or excerpts from
Washington Post
or
New York Times
articles are isolated and accompanied by recommendations as to how the story should have been phrased or written.
Without this kind of reporting, the argument goes, Biden would be far better off.
My news
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Bundeswehr should prepare cruise missiles
2 hours ago
“It burns wonderfully”: Pro-Ukrainian militia allegedly blows up Russian ammunition depots – video shows attack reading
Russia is probably mobilizing in the tank camp - only bad equipment left? read
Attacks on oil refineries: Ukraine weakens Russia in one place in particular – read “well-calculated strategy”.
Ukraine armada unnerves Russia blogger: read drone number “unimaginably large”.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) looks at newspapers on Capitol Hill in 2021. A Washington Post and University of Maryland poll last year showed that most Americans get their news outside the traditional media system.
© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
US election survey: Which media do Republican and Democratic supporters trust?
In December , The Post
and its partner at the University of Maryland surveyed
Americans about their primary news source.
Only 3 percent of those surveyed said the
postal service
.
Eight percent said the
Times
.
The two newspapers were the primary source of information for 7 percent of independents and a staggering 1 percent of Republicans.
Four times as many Republicans said their primary source of news came from far-right outlets such as
One America News
or
Daily Wire
than said they
cited the
Times
or
Post as their primary source.
The category most commonly cited by respondents was “other” – the news sources respondents cited were not included in the list and ranged from small media sites to fundamentalist religious sites.
The second most cited primary news source was
Fox News
.
Three in 10 Republicans said the right-wing channel and its website are their preferred news source.
Of course, many Americans don't pay attention to the news at all.
A
CNN
poll released in February found that 35 percent of respondents were either paying only as much attention to the presidential campaign as necessary or actively avoiding it.
Only a quarter said they frequently kept up with information about the election campaign.
Three in 10 Republicans said this, compared to two in 10 Democrats.
The argument that follows is obvious: Maybe more Democrats would sit up and take notice if the media coverage was explicitly positive for Biden!
Maybe, but that assumes they already see and disapprove of the coverage.
A more likely explanation is that Trump supporters are more excited about their candidate's nomination than Biden supporters are about their candidate's.
In the
American Prospect
, Ryan Cooper argues that to get Democrats excited about the election, Democrats need to create a media outlet that is explicitly partisan.
In the short term, this seems unnecessary as a massive operation to promote Biden will soon be underway: his campaign.
Distorted picture: Many Americans don't know about the many lawsuits against Trump
Cooper points to polls by left-wing writer Kevin Drum that show many Americans are unaware of Trump's legal problems.
These polls show that the vast majority of Biden supporters are well aware of Trump's legal problems.
It is not clear how a party publication would do better than existing media outlets.
"What I envision is a fact-based publication with a liberal framework - some straight journalism, plus some formal partisan messaging, similar to the traditional separation between reporting and opinion," Cooper writes.
There's certainly nothing wrong with that.
It is generally beneficial to have explicitly partisan news outlets because they are motivated to engage with the opposition much more deeply than others might.
The problem is that the subsequent framing can obscure the truth, such as when left-wing publications repeatedly claimed that the man indicted for falsely accusing Biden of taking bribes did so on behalf of Russian intelligence .
The response will be that the traditional media uses their own blackout frames, which may well be true!
But I think there's a big difference between a medium that relies on accuracy and occasionally presents a blurry image, and a medium that relies on presenting a point of view and strives for accuracy.
Trend in the USA: Media should perfectly reflect one's own inclinations
So it seems that criticism of the media is often selective or exaggerated.
So much attention is paid to newspaper front pages that has become largely irrelevant in recent decades.
But there is a separate industry focused on the
Times
, made up of people who want the
Times
to perfectly reflect their political leanings.
Ironically, a new, explicitly Democratic publication probably wouldn't have much impact on politics - given the awareness already evident in polls - but it might be more commercially successful given the market for such a representation of the news.
Some of these complaints seem to be a natural reaction to the current situation.
The Donald Trump era in politics has led traditional news outlets to use terms that are both negative and accurate when describing him and his allies: “mendacious,” “anti-democratic,” or “authoritarian.”
This has helped create an expectation that reporters should share the politics and attitudes of readers.
If this is not the case, frustration arises.
That's not why Biden is fighting Trump.
The impact of a story in the
Post
or a social media post from the
Times
is minimal even among our readers, let alone Americans as a whole.
It's productive for readers if we try to steer our reporting in a direction that's more politically useful (and of course it's always fair to point out clear errors).
But this is simply an example of making an impact where you can;
Changing the frame of a
Post
article doesn't change the fact that Sean Hannity continually makes unsubstantiated claims.
All of this sure sounds defensive.
To some extent it is.
But it's also the case that framing news articles or stories on cable news has far less reach than people think.
Biden spoke to 32 million people in prime time and failed to significantly increase his approval rating.
Do you think a different headline on the
Post
's front page will have more impact?
To the author
Philip Bump
is a
Post
columnist based in New York.
He writes the newsletter How To Read This Chart and is the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 15, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.