Biden, Harris, and the Manufactured Crisis of the Corporate Media

 

Joe Biden's exit and Kamala Harris's replacement as a Democratic nominee for president changes and confuses the corporate media script in its coverage of the 2024 election.  Nothing better captures that than the coverage within the 24 hours after Biden's announcement that he was leaving the race and endorsing Kamala Harris.

            The first imperative of corporate media is to run stories to make money and maintain audiences. This includes public radio and public television. One can say that the mantra for the corporate media is “all the news fits the script,” or “ all the news that sells we tell.”  The task of the corporate media is to create news or confusion where it does not exist.  For the corporate media, because they have a narrative or script for how to do reporting, if something does not fit into that narrative or script, the reporters are confused themselves, and their confusion becomes the story.  Bad or lazy reporting is appealing to existing narratives, simply  assuming the story is one thing when it reality it had changed.

            For the last several months, the corporate media story about the 2024 presidential race was predictable. It was how Biden and Trump were going through the primaries, rolling up the delegates and  how the election would be a rematch between the two of them. The corporate media had a story and reporters simply copied that script.

            At some point the sub story began to focus upon Biden's mental capacities, but this was not until his disastrous debate with Trump in June.  Prior to that there is evidence that the corporate media knew of some of these mental problems, but chose not to cover but once that debate occurred, their narrative shifted. It became about his mental capacities and about efforts to oust him.

            With that what would happen if he's ousted, who would be his likely replacement? That story came to a head on July 21 when Joe Biden announced that he was abandoning his presidential race, freeing up his delegates and endorsing Kamala Harris. This up ended the corporate media script for coverage of the presidential race. As one listened to the news that day, the stories were about chaos, that now we  had chaos or the Democratic Party was  in chaos in terms of what would happen.

            Within less than an hour of Biden saying he was stepping down, reporters were frantic and asking, why hasn't Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama endorsed Harris? Will there be an open convention? Will Harris have enough votes or support to win the nomination? Will there be there be challengers? The reporters seem genuinely perplexed. However, the reality was that the reporter-proclaimed crisis was a manufactured crisis that resolved itself quite quickly.

            If there was chaos at all, it ended Sunday afternoon on July 21 when Biden said he was leaving the race. The  real chaos had been what would had been occurring for several weeks prior. Additionally, many of the questions that were posed by confused reporters who did not know how to make sense out of the new narrative, were quickly resolved.

            Nancy Pelosi soon endorsed Kamala Harris within 24 hours. Harris, according to AP, had enough delegates to win the Convention on the first round.  Possible challengers to Harris quickly endorsed her, and Harris set a one day record in terms of fundraising.  By the end of Monday, July 22 almost all the perplexities and problems that the corporate media reporters were raising had been resolved.