Op-Ed: Biden’s accomplishments have been short-changed

For four years, the phrase “infrastructure week” was a punchline. A metaphor for the abysmal failure that was supposed to be Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement.

It took Joe Biden less than a year to make good on a transformational piece of legislation that will reshape America’s cities, towns and communities. If Biden achieved little else for the rest of his term, the enactment of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would be enough to cement his record for tangibly improving the lives of Americans.

And yet, I can’t help but think that Biden has been short-changed in how his first year has been framed by the mainstream media, which has largely been guided by the playbook of politics-as-usual.

In the 2016 campaign, the media gave Trump the equivalent of $2 billion in free media coverage. During his presidency, the White House press briefings, when they happened, were aired live on every cable news network, despite the fact that they were littered with outright lies and deceptions. The very few times that Trump managed to restrain himself, he was rewarded with embarrassing praise.

For the better part of the summer and fall of 2021, the Beltway press bombarded audiences with inside-baseball process stories parsing every twist and turn of the infrastructure legislation, fanning the flames of the “Democrats in disarray” narrative.

As the focus shifted to the Build Back Better plan and voting rights legislation, the media narrative largely gave the Republican Party’s unanimous obstruction a free pass. The Jan. 18 edition of Politico’s Playbook led with the phrase, “Senate Democrats resume their doomed push on voting rights and election reform…” Axios featured the headline “Biden’s epic failures.” Biden’s forceful speech on voting rights in Atlanta was overshadowed by the media’s fixation on the GOP’s faux indignation. What the media needs to remember is that the only reason why they are issues in the first place is because of the Republican Party — a party that has made the conscious decision to withdraw from democracy.

I am not suggesting that the mainstream media adopt the propaganda-level machinations of the GOP-media sphere. But I do think media institutions have huge influence in shaping public perception and how that perception is weaponized by the anti-democratic forces in America.

Consider this passage from an Associated Press story that was published recently: “Former President Donald Trump, who regularly pilloried the media, did 92 interviews in his first year in office, more than two dozen of those with friendly interlocutors at Fox News. But Trump also held lengthy sessions with ABC News, the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters and other outlets whose coverage he impugned throughout his presidency.”

Missing from this “analysis”? The fact that during his four years in office, Trump made more than 30,500 false or misleading claims, otherwise called lies. By…