Who is J.D. Vance? Millions of Americans have been asking this question since former President Donald Trump announced that Vance, a bestselling author and junior senator from Ohio, would be his running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Unfortunately, the majority of prominent media sources available to our nation’s electorate have already proven themselves unable (or unwilling) to answer it.
Given we are talking about the potential next vice president of the country — and, if history is our tutor, a likely future president — such malfeasance represents the embarrassing degree to which our establishment media have abandoned their mission.
Post More Interested in Vance’s Neighbors Than His Politics
The Washington Post, given its location in our nation’s capital — and history (or notoriety) of reporting on the latest political scoops and scandals — purports to be the most important print source of election-related news in the country. Yet in the days following the announcement of Vance being selected as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, the Post directed its news coverage to negative (if not also bizarre) stories regarding the sitting senator.
One such piece discussed how many of Vance’s neighbors in his overwhelmingly liberal Northern Virginia community don’t like him (not exactly a surprise given the Washington metropolitan area has twice as many Democrats as Republicans). Another noted that many people who admired Vance after reading his 2016 bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, now detest him because of his politics. Yet another reported that a few far-right loonies have criticized Vance for marrying a woman of South-Asian descent or, alternatively, highlighted Vance’s earlier criticisms of Trump. One even alleged that he’s an “election-denier” (part and parcel of the Post’s publicly acknowledged willingness to forgo neutrality in its news reporting).
In vain will Post readers find much, if any, reporting on Vance’s tenure in the Senate, during which time he co-sponsored bills with Democrat Sens. Raphael Warnock and Elizabeth Warren, nor even his current senatorial committee assignments, which would give an indication of his congressional expertise. What you will learn instead is that he held up dozens of ambassador nominations because of concerns over diplomats’ positions on transgender ideology and diversity hiring — as if the quality and pace of Department of State postings are of serious concern to anyone besides foreign policy wonks or a few federal employees. Though I subscribe to the Post, I had to run a search within its website to find a single article detailing Vance’s positions on such topics as the economy, abortion, immigration, and Ukraine.
Media’s Vance Coverage Proves Their Corruption
Not that The Washington Post is all that unique. CNN’s “Fast Facts” offers no information on Vance’s political positions — though, once again, you’ll learn he was once critical of Trump (aren’t people allowed to change their political opinions?). Another CNN piece analyzes Vance’s positions according to his autobiography, as if a 2016 book published years before he was even in politics is the best source available on that topic. You’ll also learn from CNN that Russia is reportedly eager to have Vance on the ticket, while other European nations are not. (Does CNN think Russians or Europeans should be voting in our presidential election?)
Or try this: Run a search in Google for J.D. Vance, click “news,” and see what you get. When I did on July 22, the top stories included further reporting on far-right personalities attacking Vance’s wife and multiple op-eds claiming that Vance is a hillbilly poser who doesn’t represent the white working-class or Appalachia. According to The Atlantic, “‘Hillbilly’ Women Will Get No Help From J. D. Vance,” and he is full of “hillbilly excuses.” (I suppose we should have always expected elitist mockery of a man willing to self-identify using derogatory slang).
Like Most Elites, Media Are Failing in Their Duties
“So what?” you may retort to the media’s not-exactly-surprising leftist bent. Legacy media are offering nothing but critical coverage of a Republican politician gunning for the second-highest office in the land — would we expect anything different in 2024? The answer, for those who have been paying attention to a media sphere that has quite willingly shed its attempts to be unbiased — Republicans comprising less than 5 percent of journalists — is no, we should obviously not expect impartiality from the likes of MSNBC or The New York Times.
Nevertheless, leftist corporate media’s coverage of J.D. Vance indicates something even more damning than its obvious, long-documented political bias. American voters know that media in the last generation have undergone a “siloing”: Left-leaning voters watch CNN or “The Big Three” (ABC, NBC, CBS), and right-leaning voters watch Fox News. Democrats read The Washington Post and The New York Times, while conservatives read The Wall Street Journal.
Though voters are now accustomed to expecting bias even in news coverage, one might at least hope that in an election year, voters of all political persuasions would be able to learn from any news source a few basic facts about the people on both presidential tickets, including, most importantly, what political positions those candidates hold and why.
That finding such information now requires wading through pages (or hours) of biased, politically motivated content cynically presented as straight factual reporting is an indictment on a fourth estate that has become embarrassingly compromised by ideology.
Who is J.D. Vance? Don’t bother asking legacy media — even if they knew, they wouldn’t tell you. Much better, in their view, to force-feed audiences on buzzwords (e.g., “election-denier,” “anti-immigrant,” “white nationalist”) aimed at ruining the Ohio senator’s reputation by November. Thankfully, fewer and fewer Americans are fooled by such journalistic chicanery.
Yet, as citizens of a free republic, we should expect more from our educated, professional class, who, whatever their personal political opinions, are supposed to be motivated by a patriotic, humble sense of service to all American citizens. As the framers understood, the establishment, because of its position of relative power, is supposed to strenuously labor to serve and faithfully communicate with the electorate in all its diversity, lest it be perceived by that electorate as a tyrannical oligarchy. And if you know much of anything about vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, you’d know such motivations are central to his own meteoric entrance into public service.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
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