Circles within circles in coverage of the debt ceiling

Eighteen months ago, I wrote in this newsletter about coverage of Senate Republicans’ obstructionism over the debt ceiling, an artificial borrowing cap that Democrats were then trying to raise. At the time, various media critics had taken the political press to task for “both-sidesing” the story, covering it as a “showdown” for which both parties bore responsibility rather than a cynical and hypocritical GOP gambit. (Hypocritical because Republicans voted repeatedly to raise the debt ceiling under President Trump while also running up more debt.)

Senate Republicans eventually allowed the Democratic majority to kick the can down the road for two months, through December 2021, at which point Congressional Democrats voted through a longer-term hike to the debt ceiling. Earlier this year, however, the issue came around again…

An estimated “X-date” of sometime in early June soon swam into focus. Cue another round of Washington psychodrama—this time with Republicans in the House majority and demanding sharp spending cuts in exchange for a vote on the debt ceiling. Cue, too, another round of media criticism of the coverage of the psychodrama—including from Fallows, who again urged reporters not to take a “both-sides” approach, and pointed back to his work from 2021. “The issues,” he wrote, “are the same.”

This time around, many liberal media critics have taken issue with coverage that they have seen as normalizing Republican “hostage-taking” over the debt ceiling, the raising of which is a matter of meeting financial obligations that Congress has already authorized (not a question of approving new spending) and has usually been handled without much drama. Jonathan Chait, of New York magazine, accused several reporters and analysts of conflating “negotiation” over the debt ceiling (which has happened in the past) with House Republicans’ current “extortion” tactics…

Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog group, analyzed coverage in five major newspapers and found that relatively few of their articles mentioned Republicans’ role in hiking the debt while voting to raise the debt ceiling under Trump.

This criticism of the coverage has faced pushback, and not only from predictable quarters: some progressive Democrats have argued that President Biden himself normalized Republican tactics by eventually agreeing to negotiate with McCarthy having previously said that he would not, then ceded narrative ground to the GOP by staying relatively silent as Republican negotiators dished frequently to the reporters covering the talks. Indeed, the idea that McCarthy was winning the media war congealed into a sort of meta-narrative, not least in the press itself. Last week, Punchbowl wrote that House Republicans had been “surprisingly successful at setting the overall public narrative for the negotiations as the endgame unfolds.” House Republicans then blasted this line out in a press release, characterizing it as mainstream-media praise.

If all this seems frustratingly circular to you, you wouldn’t be the only one—indeed, it’s possible to see the McCarthy-narrative narrative as one of a number of concentric circles here, with the outermost being the circular nature of the debt-ceiling question itself.

More From CJR: