Republicans pounce

The phrase "Republicans pounce" (sometimes "conservatives pounce") refers to an alleged phenomenon of media bias in the United States against Republicans and conservatives in terms of how political news stories and headlines are framed. Proponents of the concept argue that journalists tend to downplay controversies and potentially negative stories about Democrats, liberals, and progressives by emphasizing the Republican or conservative response to the story, rather than the negative aspects of the story themselves.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag Another Gallup poll in 2017 found that 62 percent of Americans thought the media had a partisan bias; of these, 64 percent thought it favored Democrats, while 22 percent thought it favored Republicans.^[1]

A 2020 study found that a "dominant majority" (60 percent) of U.S. political journalists identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning. However, the study also found no statistical significance in journalists' response rates to a fictitious local candidate's request for news coverage, regardless of how the candidate identified politically.^[2]

Examples

Commentators have explicitly cited various news articles as examples of the "Republicans pounce" phenomenon. Wall Street Journal editor James Freeman discussed the construction in the context of the 2019 article "Ocasio-Cortez Team Flubs a Green New Deal Summary, and Republicans Pounce" in The New York Times . Freeman called Ocasio-Cortez's bill "a radical idea which deserved to be hooted down," adding: "One doesn’t need to be a Republican to criticize the idea of handouts for people who refuse to work."^[3][4]

Washington Examiner editor Quin Hillyer criticized the Associated Press' coverage of Harvard University president Claudine Gay's resignation as an example of the "Republicans pounce" framework. After Gay resigned in the wake of plagiarism allegations, the AP's headline had called plagiarism a "new conservative weapon against colleges". Hillyer described the AP story as "full of bias and inaccuracies... as if plagiarism is an issue only because conservatives make it one".^[5] Journalists such as Robby Soave and Andrew Kaczynski also criticized the AP's framing of the story; Soave wrote that "in some corners of the media, the fact [Gay] committed plagiarism matters much less than the reality that it was conservative writers who caught her."^[6]

Other purported examples of "Republicans pounce" include the 2015 story "Republicans seize on Planned Parenthood video" in The Hill^[7][8] and the 2023 story "Republicans pounce on Biden over appearance of Chinese spy balloon" in Yahoo! News.^[9][10]

The 1933 New York Times article "Revived Republicans Pounce on Democrats" may be one of the first occurrences of this phrasing in print.^[11][12] However, the overwhelming majority of "Republicans pounce" headlines in the Times or The Washington Post have been printed in the 21st century.^[11]

Analysis

Commentary writer Noah Rothman argues that the "Republicans pounce" construction "distracts from Democratic scandals or failures of governance," making it "the preferred prism through which to view events Democrats find... discomforting."^[7]

Washington Examiner editor Nicholas Clairmont has claimed that the use of the "Republicans pounce" trope is a form of "othering" by journalists, although not necessarily deliberate or inaccurate. He argues that this phrase furthers the impression that Republicans "aren’t presenting an opposing political argument you might wish to consider. They’re stalking through the bushes, hidden and hungry and violent."^[13]

National Review political correspondent Jim Geraghty has criticized "Republicans pounce" headlines for contributing to political polarization. He claims that such headlines give the public a "psychological permission slip" to ignore legitimate issues or scandals, since "the consequences of a policy of dismantling the police matter more than who’s pouncing over the proposal."^[14]

Conservative writers Charles C. W. Cooke and John Hirschauer have linked "Republicans pounce" to media coverage suggesting that Republican politicians are engaging in "culture wars."^[15][16] According to Cooke, "the press assumes that what the Democrats are doing is normal and that what Republicans are doing is not — even when it is the Democrats who are proposing big changes", which makes it easier to portray Republicans as "the aggressor".^[15]

Legitimacy

The legitimacy of "Republicans pounce" as an indicator of media bias is disputed. In a 2019 search of the Factiva news archive, Wall Street Journal editor James Freeman found 311 occurrences of the phrasing "Democrats pounce," compared with 245 occurrences of "Republicans pounce." While this suggested that the framing has been applied more toward Democrats, Freeman acknowledged that the phenomenon was "difficult to measure qualitatively."^[3]

Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake has claimed that the use of the "pounce" framing "appears to be pretty bipartisan in its implementation." Searching U.S. newspapers and wire services between 2010 and 2019, Blake found 1,732 instances of Democrats or liberals "pouncing," versus 1,427 instances of Republicans or conservatives doing the same. However, he cautioned that this approach had several limitations: it did not survey cable news; it did not include similar verbs such as "seize on"; and it did not assess the severity of the controversy being "pounced" upon.^[11] Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum argues that only limited conclusions can be drawn from simple keyword searches, writing: "What we really need to know is whether Republicans suffer more than Democrats from a general framing that focuses on the opposition response instead of the initial miscue."^[17]

References

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