Perhaps Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo) was just having a bad brain day and thus got carried away with a favored bugaboo. I can't say. What I can say is that his identical lede and ensuing wrapup are criticisms not of legitimate "press groupthink," as Josh so heatedly asserts, but mere flurries of his imagination. His opening:
"NBC just moved this story: RON DESANTIS’ DONORS AND ALLIES QUESTION IF HE’S READY FOR 2024. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is becoming an example of the kind of press groupthink we often, very rightly, view with disdain."
And his concluding line:
"I do think he’s going to get chewed up by [the political] process. But don’t forget this is also journalistic group think and conventional wisdom in action."
Four NBC reporters interviewed "more than 20 GOP strategists, politicians and donors" about DeSantis's troubles, which began with his flippant remark about the Russia-Ukraine war being a "territorial dispute." There's no question of a growing neurosis among those Republican donors and strategists who bivouacked early in DeSantis's camp. And their nervousness now doubles as "conventional wisdom." Indeed I would wonder about the competence of these donors and operatives if they laughed at the conventional-ness of the thinking that reigns. Hence this is one "example" of "disdained" conventional wisdom that, in fact, merits no disdain.
But why and how did Marshall go further and conceive such wisdom as but another example of "press groupthink"? I'm no card-carrying defender of the political press, but a story on a blazingly obvious political development strikes me not as cliquish conformism.
That phenomenon arrived in a huge herd in 2019 and 2020, hauling Joe Biden with it — not on the herd's shoulders, but under its hooves. Even before Iowa and New Hampshire, the political press was writing him off. Alternatively, I was writing that Biden would, as a matter of predictable fact, be the Democratic nominee — which I continued writing even after Iowa and New Hampshire, when the press uniformly had poor Joe dead and buried. My posts were snickered at and derided as foolish; I was written off as some sort of Biden hack, when all I was doing was reading the coming, turnaround effect of South Carolina.
That was groupthink, by both the press and most of the Democratic rank and file. What Marshall points out is not.