Ballot Boxing: Bush sinking and bias rising

Welcome to Ballot Boxing, WORLD’s weekly roundup of political news and views from the presidential campaign trail.

On the morning after another cloudy debate performance for Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush, the struggling candidate stood in front of an ironic slogan on a campaign banner in sunny New Hampshire: “JEB CAN FIX IT.”

Was this a message about the country or his campaign? At the moment, the former governor of Florida may find both equally perplexing.

For a gauge of Bush’s image problem, here’s how the candidate found himself characterizing his campaign to supporters in New Hampshire: “It’s not on life support.”

Not the slogan a former front-runner wants to peddle on the campaign trail, but Bush reminded wary supporters he still had plenty of time and cash.

But even that assurance belied a troubling reality: Last week, Bloomberg Politics reported an internal memo showed the Bush campaign would slash payroll costs by 40 percent, and significantly reduce staff.

The campaign may not be on life support, but it’s certainly on a diet.

Meanwhile, other campaigns are fattening up. Reaction to Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) performance in Wednesday night’s GOP debate came in the form of immediate fund-raising hauls: The campaign announced it received $1.1 million in the first 24 hours after the debate.

One of Cruz’s strongest moments Wednesday night came as he lambasted the questions from CNBC moderators. (Even some left-leaning commentators admitted the moderators showed an unveiled contempt for Republicans.) Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., scored points with a similar jab against the panel, calling the press “the ultimate Super PAC” for the Democratic Party.

The exchange took me back to a 2012 event at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., where the conservative Media Research Centerhanded out T-shirts with an Obama-like logo and the slogan “Journalists for Obama.”

I didn’t see any journalists wearing the shirts at the convention, but the tongue-in-cheek message was clear: Claims of unbiased reporting from mainstream media outlets had devolved into a punch line, instead of a serious claim about the tenor of reporting.

It’s a worthy reminder ahead of a long political season. Discerning consumers of news content should remember that in a world full of pundits and politicos created in the image of God, there is no such thing as neutrality.

WORLD editor in chief Marvin Olasky underscored this in his book Telling the Truth when he said, “Biblically, there is no neutrality: We are either man centered or God centered.”

It takes discernment to watch how this plays out in the realm of presidential campaign coverage, but we don’t claim to be unbiased in how we see the world. WORLD does its best to view it through the lens of God’s inerrant Word, realizing that’s sometimes easy (abortion is wrong) and sometimes difficult (trade agreements are complicated).

In practical terms, we can look at the same sky as a man-centered journalist and see the same thing: The sky is blue. But dig a level deeper and we’ll come to a very different conclusion about what the sky means for the people who live underneath it: “The heavens declare the glory of God.”