Why Does the Mainstream Media Treat Trump With the Equal and Opposite Convention of So-Called Balance?
Then we examine the role of the mainstream media in treating Trump, who is the leader of one of America’s two major parties, with the normal binary, equal and opposite media convention of so-called balance. Joining us is Will Bunch, who is an award-winning national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he blogs at attytood.com. He is the author of The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream and, most recently, After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It. We discuss his latest articles at the Philadelphia Inquirer, “U.S. 2025 dictatorship threat just got real” and “As the World Burns, A Cowardly News Media Endangers US Democracy.”
A Preview of the Biden/Xi Summit in San Francisco
Then we get a preview of Wednesday’s meeting between President Biden and China’s Xi Jinping at the APEC summit just underway in San Francisco. Joining us to discuss what can be done to reverse the downward spiral of relations between the world’s two largest economies is Orville Schell, who was formerly the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and currently is the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. His books include Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century, and most recently My Old Home: A Novel of Exile.
Will the Saboteur Joe Manchin Deliver Biden a Fatal Blow?
Then finally we get a local perspective on Joe Manchin who has already sabotaged Biden’s legislative agenda and, now having left the Senate, has undermined the Democrats’ slim majority and is poised to end Biden’s presidency by likely running as a third party candidate under the No Labels banner. Joining us is James Van Nostrand, who until recently was the Director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development and a Professor of Law at West Virginia University College of Law and is the author of The Coal Trap: How West Virginia Was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution.