New Republic: the media is biased against liberals

Did you know that conservatives set the cultural standards of our society, and that is the reason why the media is so unfair to Democrats?

I didn’t, but after reading this brilliant and convincing article by Michael Tomasky of The New Republic, I am convinced. Despite being nearly perfect in every way, the media obsesses over every little foible of Democrats and holds them to a much higher standard than Republicans.

Who knew?

New Column: Media expectation bias. When you’re a good family man, the press will accuse you of “hypocrisy” about a thing like this new grandchild. But when you’re Trump (all-around scumbag) there’s no hypocrisy, see how it works?!! https://t.co/9mZp3nTaeF Follow @newrepublic

— Michael Tomasky (@mtomasky) July 10, 2023

Yes, it’s true. Joe Biden is a brilliant, totally competent sweetheart to whom the press has been totally unfair while giving Republicans a pass because everybody expects them to be uncultured brutes.

Joe Biden recently unveiled the term “Bidenomics” to express and encompass the positive economic news—and there’s a lot of it—that he hopes will lift him tom reelection.

Also recently unveiled—not by Biden, but about him, and presumably against his preferences—is the existence of four-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, a grandchild of the president whom he has never publicly acknowledged.*

Why do I juxtapose these two seemingly unrelated developments? Because they may not be so unrelated after all. The media coverage of both tells us a lot about the political culture we inhabit today. It’s a culture that has been shaped and defined by the political right, and it works almost entirely to their advantage. In sum: We live now in a political culture where the party that is trying to uphold some standards and values gets judged and punished because it sometimes falls short of those standards and values, while the party that makes no effort along those lines gets away with everything because no one expects any better of it in the first place.

Sounds about right. The media goes easy on Republicans every day. They were famously easy on Trump, dismissing obviously true stories of him coordinating with the Russians, being a decades-long Russian asset, and hiring hookers to pee on Obama’s bed.

Biden, who works every day to make sure the law is evenly applied, saved the American economy from total collapse, and who loves his family dearly, gets criticized relentlessly. The media is unfairly (barely) noticing that in defending Democracy from Darkness he has shielded his son from his felonies, and took note once or twice that he works tirelessly to ignore the fact that he has a grandchild who was inconveniently born in a virgin birth.

While Biden is trying to do stuff, Republicans don’t try to do anything. Cut taxes. That’s about it. Oh, and repeal the biggest expansion of health care in half a century. But the party has no domestic economic agenda and hasn’t for years.

And because they’re not trying to do anything, nobody expects anything of them. So they skate. And on top of that, the right-wing press, which wouldn’t utter one positive syllable about Biden if the GDP grew by 10 percent while he simultaneously cured Alzheimer’s and brought democracy to North Korea, hammers at Biden relentlessly, which further advances people’s negative perceptions.

Yup. Biden has done so much for America, selflessly getting up (barely) every day, shuffling around with a vacant look on his face, yelling at his staff, and nobody is grateful. Imagine how many fewer kids would be exposed to the genitals of perverts, be forced to read pornography in schools, and be sterilized and mutilated without Biden’s leadership.

This, my friends, is what amounts to reporting from the Left-wing. And someone, somewhere, eats it up. I can’t imagine who exactly, since even most Democrats think it is time for Biden to shuffle shakily off the stage to shake imaginary peoples’ hands outside the public eye.

[T]he mainstream media hold Democrats to a far higher standard than it holds Republicans, because the Democrats try things and sometimes fail, which is an easy “gotcha!” for the press, while the Republicans, who try nothing, can’t be “gotcha’d!” Passing an infrastructure bill, as Biden’s Democrats did, just invites scrutiny of its implementation. Whereas failing to pass one, as Trump’s Republicans did, is par for the course and by definition invites no such scrutiny. And the right-wing media, of course, holds Republicans to no standards at all.

That is today’s real media bias. It’s a bias of expectations, and it always mitigates in favor of the people of whom nothing is expected in the first place.

The MSM. They really are unfair to Democrats. Next thing you know they might say a bad word about an honest man like Adam Schiff.

That would be really unfair. He, too, saved Democracy.