Does the NYT's Reflect America

The conventional wisdom is not complicated. Jeb is out of step with the primary electorate on immigration. He has struggled in multiple interviews and two debates. He is identified with a political establishment that voters mistrust due to huge failures: foreign policy that made a mess of the Middle East, a catastrophic financial crisis, and stagnant middle-class wages.

This is basic stuff. The Bush family surely understands it.

And I find it hard to believe that neither the Bush camp nor The New York Times journalists reporting on it are aware that the family’s “role in American history” and mistrust of Jeb are also inseparable from a certain other Bush, whose unsuccessful presidency alienated Democrats, independents, and many Tea Partiers.

Why is George W. Bush scarcely mentioned in this article?

Jeb’s struggles were always predictable, and they make sense even as they unfold. But an article that relies on establishment insiders for all its quotes and adheres to a style that doesn’t allow its authors to inject skepticism is going to fail to adequately explain an election in which establishment failures are driving voter behavior. This is especially so when the figures being quoted are sophisticated political operators who have every reason to speak strategically rather than candidly.

Look at this passage:

Quote:

In July, even after breaking a vertebra in a fall that left him hospitalized in Maine, the elder Mr. Bush was fuming at the news of the day: Mr. Trump had belittled Sen. John McCain of Arizona for being taken prisoner in Vietnam.

“I can’t understand how somebody could say that and still be taken seriously,” said Mr. Bush, himself a naval aviator in World War II, according to his longtime spokesman, Jim McGrath, who had visited him

.
This doesn’t merely ask us to treat a politician father’s statement about his politician son’s campaign as earnest, not strategic––it also asks us to believe that a longtime PR flack faithfully represented that father’s words to a New York Times reporter during a primary race; and that even though Bush 41 saw Bush 43’s campaign trash McCain in South Carolina––and saw Swift Boat Veterans for Truth four years later––he just can’t fathom how unfair attacks on a Vietnam vet aren’t disqualifying.

The writing is so smooth and official-sounding that one almost fails to notice all those asks.

But, come on.

What the “neutral” or “objective” style of newspaper writing ultimately obscures is that there’s no such thing as what Jay Rosen of NYU calls “the view from nowhere.”

To end up with “Bush at 91: Irritated and Invigorated by ’16 Race” required lots of contestable news judgments. Implicit are the notions that the Bush family somehow established a valid original script for the Republican Party’s nominating contest; that Jeb’s campaign struggles are so hard to understand that they baffle and confound a former president and his circle of sophisticated politicos; that readers should accept their claims that they just don’t understand all this ugliness and populism in politics, never mind that they’ve worked with Lee Atwater and Karl Rove; that George W. Bush’s effect on the family’s legacy and Jeb’s campaign is best left unexplored; and that insiders rather than outsiders are best positioned to offer insights into the subject of the article.