"[T]he overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets — national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks — really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly."

"In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties’ ideologies. Over the years, many press critics have pointed out one weakness of this approach: false equivalence, the refusal to consider the possibility that one side of an argument is simply (or mostly) right.... There’s also the possibility that both political parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.... The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagan’s laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored.... Political and economic journalism too often assumes otherwise and treats the center as inherently sensible.... [C]entrist bias... helps explain why the 2016 presidential debates focused more on the budget deficit, a topic of centrist zealotry, than climate change, almost certainly a bigger threat.... Sometimes, people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right. Even when they’re not, they deserve the same skepticism that other politicians do — no less, no more."

From "How ‘Centrist Bias’ Hurts Sanders and Warren/The media has a bigger problem than liberal bias" by David Leonhardt (NYT).

Did the part of the quote that I put in the post title wreck your openness to this argument? One word in particular — "non-Fox." The entire assertion — "the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets... really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly" — strikes me as wrong. But to create a big group — national magazines, newspapers, public radio, and television networks — and then to exclude only Fox is a plain display of liberal bias. I can't watch any television news, because it's all biased. If all those "non-Fox" networks "really are doing their best," then "their best" is not good enough.

There is a worthy point in Leonhardt's column however, and I would take it further. If these news outlets really were to start giving us the best coverage of American political news, they would cut themselves off severely from any support for either party, not simply accept the way the issues are presented by the 2 parties and balance between the 2 sides. I'm not talking about whether the claim of balance is honest and accurate. I assume it's not. It's that these 2 parties — neither of which is impressively virtuous and competent — are allowed to define the substance and scope of the coverage.

Leonhardt seems mainly to want more supportive coverage for the further left Democratic candidates and more of a challenge to the bland middling candidates like Biden. He briefly acknowledges that the media underestimated Trump in 2016 (and Reagan in 1980) and attributes this to "centrist bias." But how did Trump win in spite of this intense bias against him? He was too extreme even to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. The media were content to accept Jeb Bush as about right for the GOP, similar to the way they're passing Joe Biden along uncritically. Trump broke through on his own. He turned the media bias against him into a positive force. I don't see Sanders and Warren doing that.