Jonathan Capehart – Media Nation

A passionate President Biden delivers the best SOTU address I can remember

President Biden delivered what I thought was the best State of the Union address I can remember. He was energized, passionate, funny and focused. He mixed it up with Republicans on issues ranging from Ukraine to reproductive rights and, aside from unfortunately adopting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s slur while answering back at her (he referred to undocumented immigrants as “illegals”), he escaped unscathed.

For those of us who look back to Barack Obama as the gold standard, well, the SOTU doesn’t often produce a memorable speech. Obama’s two for the ages are his address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and his eulogy at Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015. No one remembers his SOTU speeches.

We were also treated an an exceedingly weird performance by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who sat there looking miserable, trying to be impassive, but reflexively nodding from time to time as though he agreed with Biden. I don’t know how to describe Vice President Kamala Harris except to say that she was resplendent and may have improved her political standing through body language alone.

I caught a little bit of the commentary by the “PBS NewsHour” folks afterwards, and the theme they seemed to be settling into was that Biden’s speech was overly political. Good grief. These are the times we live in. Jonathan Capehart put it well, though, calling it “an epic speech” and that Democrats “will be energized by the cranky grandpa.”

Yes, they will. The polling for Biden has been awful lately as the media, and especially The New York Times, have obsessed over the president’s age. Maybe the SOTU will be a turning point.

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Media critic Dan Froomkin unloads on The Washington Post’s opinion section

Jonathan Capehart, right, with civil-rights leader Dr. Clarence B. Jones. Photo (cc) 2015 by The Communications Network.

Back when I was reporting and researching “The Return of the Moguls,” my 2018 book about The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Orange County Register, I had a dilemma. My goal was to write about how the business models of those papers were changing under wealthy ownership. The Post and the Globe were producing excellent journalism as well — and the Register, at least before it all went bad, was improving.

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But what to do about the Post’s opinion section? The Post is our second- or third-most influential newspaper (depending on where you rank The Wall Street Journal), but its editorial pages under the late Fred Hiatt were problematic — dull and dumb, with a few notable exceptions, and pro-war besides. Since I didn’t intend to write a book of media criticism, I decided to punt, describing the section as “moderately liberal with a taste for foreign intervention.”

Well, the Post is going off the rails in all sorts of ways lately. Sara Fischer of Axios reported earlier this week that Jonathan Capehart, one of those notable exceptions, had quit the editorial board, leaving it with precisely zero people of color. (Capehart, who appears weekly with New York Times columnist David Brooks on the “PBS NewsHour,” remains a staff writer and video host with the Post’s opinion section.)

And now Dan Froomkin, an independent liberal media watchdog, has weighed in with a scorching commentary headlined “The Washington Post opinion section is a sad, toxic wasteland.” Yikes! It’s a long piece — worth reading in full — but essentially Froomkin’s argument is that the section has actually gotten worse under Hiatt’s successor, David Shipley. Froomkin writes:

The New York Times opinion section regularly publishes absolute tripe – most recently, a barrage of virulent and ignorant anti-trans rhetoric and panicking about wokeism. Several of its columnists are well past their sell-by date. Some are just trolls.

But there’s no denying that overall, it remains intellectually stimulating, ground-breaking, and consequential.

The Post’s opinion section doesn’t come in for remotely as much criticism as the [New York] Times’s — but that’s because nobody cares about it enough to criticize it.

It offers a regular megaphone to some of the most retrograde ninnies in the business, and has had no impact on the national discourse since torture ended (they were for it).

I found Froomkin’s assessment to be overstated (yes, he does disclose that Hiatt fired him) but fundamentally correct. At a time when Jeff Bezos’ Post is losing money and shrinking after years of profits and growth, the opinion section could stand out as a way to attract new readers. Instead, he allows it to languish, dragging down a (still) great news organization that’s slipping further and further into the shadow cast by its ancient rival to the north.

Normalizing Marjorie Taylor Greene, coddling Scott Walker: Your liberal media at work

Last night, on the “PBS NewsHour,” anchor Amna Nawaz noted in a conversation with political analysts Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks that a number of Republicans have criticized President Biden over the way he’s handled the evacuation from Kabul. Fair enough. But let’s listen in:

You have a number of Republicans coming out recently speaking very critically about the president’s leadership, or lack thereof, as they say, but it really does run the spectrum of Republicans. You have everyone from Senator Ben Sasse, to Senator Ted Cruz, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and, of course, former President Trump.

Wait, what was that? Marjorie Taylor Greene is, of course, the QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theorist from Georgia who continues to defend the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Are we normalizing her now? Why, yes, of course we are. The “NewsHour” even threw up a helpful graphic to underscore the point. Good Lord. I wish Capehart or Brooks had said something, but they both let it slide.

Then, in today’s New York Times, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was defeated for re-election in 2018, claims a sizable chunk of op-ed space in order to bash teachers unions, whom he targeted repeatedly during his benighted eight years as his state’s chief executive, and to tell us how awesome he was during his time in office. He writes:

Overall, our reforms did more than just help schools and local governments. During my time in office, unemployment in Wisconsin dropped below the previous record low of 3 percent as more people were working than ever before. Median household income was up, as were wages. We balanced the budget every year with a surplus, fully funded our retirement system and had a rainy-day fund 190 times as large as when we started.

You know, we have low unemployment, high income and budget surpluses in Massachusetts, too, and we somehow manage to do it with strong teachers unions. But that’s not my point. My point is: Why? Why Walker? Why now? What is the context? I can’t think of anything taking place in the news right now that would lead an editor either to track down Scott Walker and ask him to write an op-ed or to run something he sent in over the transom.

Then again, the perceived need by liberal-oriented news organizations to bend over backwards to show that they’re fair — even to people who don’t deserve it, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Scott Walker — is primordial.

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