Biden’s unpopularity isn’t due to mainstream media coverage.

But as we reported at the time, the State of the Union often has little impact on presidential confirmations. On average since 1988, approval ratings rose by about half a point in the week following a speech, and the improvement disappeared within a month. And sure enough, Biden’s approval rating is 0.3 points higher than it was on March 7, according to an average of 538 polls.

Perhaps that will change. That number will probably rise even more as a result of this speech and Biden’s post-speech swing state visit. But once again, successive presidents have not seen much improvement. The State of the Union is a central moment of the political year, but it fails to influence, let alone engage, vast segments of the population.

This issue of engaging the American people is a central issue for politicians. The Biden administration has struggled to effectively communicate Biden’s successes to enough people to push his approval ratings into positive territory. His campaign is young but has a strong presence, but he does not consistently outperform Mr. Trump in the polls.

Many of Biden’s allies and supporters point to the mainstream media as a failing of the effort. Headlines and snippets of articles from the Washington Post and New York Times are isolated and shared with recommendations on how the article should be framed and written. There is an argument that without this kind of coverage, Biden would have done much better.

There is no doubt that I am a biased participant in this discussion. However, it seems irrefutable that this argument misunderstands the way Americans receive information.

In December, the Post and its partners at the University of Maryland asked Americans to identify their primary news sources. Only 3 percent of respondents said The Post. 8% told the Times: The two newspapers were the first source of information for 7% of independents and a whopping 1% of Republicans. Four times as many Republicans say their main news source is non-right-wing news outlets like One America News and the Daily Wire, and four times as likely as Republicans to say their main news source is the Times or the Post.

The answer category most commonly identified by respondents was “other.” The news sources identified by respondents were unlisted news outlets, ranging from small media sites to religious fundamentalist sites. The second major news source identified was Fox News. Three in 10 Republicans say right-wing channels and their websites are their go-to source for news.

This remains a central question for political actors, much less anyone else trying to reach the American people. There is a deep, well-protected chasm between the two information worlds. The Post and other traditional news organizations belong to a world that seeks to reconcile itself with objective reality. News outlets like One America and Fox News exist in a different world where adherence to a political worldview is prioritized.

I can’t speak for this paper, but given the numbers cited above, it’s safe to assume that the Post knows no more about how to bridge that gap than Biden does. And Biden’s low approval ratings are less due to those who read our coverage than to those sitting on the other side of the divide.

Last April, YouGov asked Americans how much they trusted TV personalities. The highest-rated attendee, most of whom were on the political right, was far-right commentator Dan Bongino. Four other senators, Tucker Carlson, Bret Baier, Jeanine Pirro, and Maria Bartiromo, were deemed trustworthy by more than seven out of 10 Republicans. Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham scored just under 70 percent.

How does Biden, or anyone else invested in reality, reach the people that Tucker Carlson considers trustworthy?

Of course, many Americans don’t pay attention to the news in the first place. In a CNN poll released in February, 35% of respondents said they were either paying as much attention to the presidential election as they should or actively avoiding it. Only a quarter said they searched for election campaign news frequently. Three in 10 Republicans said so, compared to 2 in 10 Democrats.

From this we can see the following argument: If media coverage were more clearly positive about Biden, perhaps more Democrats would take notice. Perhaps, but that assumes they’ve already seen the coverage and disapproved. A likely explanation is that Trump supporters report being more excited about their candidate’s nomination than Biden supporters.

In the American Prospect, Ryan Cooper argued that to energize Democrats about elections, they need to create a clearly partisan news organization. This seems redundant in the short term, given that there will soon be a massive six-figure operation underway to promote Biden.

Cooper cited evidence, including polls compiled by left-wing writer Kevin Drum, that shows many Americans are unaware of Trump’s legal problems.These polls, which I actually first reported on in the Post, show that a majority of Biden supporters do I know about the legal challenges Trump faces. It is not clear how party publications will fare better than established media.

“What I envision is a fact-based publication with a liberal framework, frank journalism with an official party message, somewhat similar to the traditional separation of reporting and opinion. ,” Cooper wrote. Sure, there’s no harm in that. Having a clearly partisan news outlet is broadly advantageous. Because they are more willing to dig deeper into the opposition than other news organizations. The problem is that subsequent fabrications can obscure the truth, as leftist publications have repeatedly claimed that the man Biden was falsely accused of accepting bribes did so as part of Russian intelligence. That’s not true.

The counter-argument here is that traditional media is applying its own ambiguous frame, which may be true. However, I think there is a valuable difference between expressions that assume accuracy, which sometimes presents a vague situation, and expressions that assume that they present a point of view that aims for accuracy.

And again, knowing my bias on this issue, media criticism is often cherry-picked and sometimes over-produced. The front pages of newspapers receive a lot of attention, but this has become largely irrelevant in recent decades. But there is a cottage industry of picking the finer points of the Times, especially from those who want the Times to fully reflect their political leanings. Ironically, new publications that are clearly pro-Democrat probably won’t have much of an impact on politics, given the perceptions already shown in opinion polls, but the market for such news representation may be more commercially successful.

There are elements to these complaints that seem like natural reactions to the moment. In the era of Donald Trump politics, traditional news outlets use negative but accurate words to describe him and his allies, such as “lying,” “anti-democratic,” and “authoritarian.” I started using it. From my perspective, that seems to help create an expectation that reporters should share their readers’ politics and frameworks. When that doesn’t happen, frustration ensues.

This is not why Biden is struggling against Trump. The impact of the Post’s article and the Times’ social media posts is minimal among Americans as a whole, and even among their audience. It feels productive to try to direct coverage in a more politically useful way (and of course it’s always fair to point out obvious mistakes). But this is just an example of exerting influence where possible. Moving the frame of the Post article does not change Sean Hannity’s constant promotion of unsubstantiated claims.

Admittedly, all of this sounds defensive. Partly yes. But it’s also true that the structure of cable news stories and segments has far less influence than people imagine. Biden woke up in prime time and spoke to 32 million people. he It failed to significantly increase his approval ratings. Do you think changing the front page headline would make a bigger difference?