It was a bad week for Team Biden with the House impeachment inquiry and the Hunter Biden indictment on three gun charges. A media elite that sought to be fair and balanced would take on the hard facts. But the networks and newspapers and wires used words like “no evidence” to absolve the Bidens.
The advocates of aggressive liberal bias have endorsed the Christiane Amanpour slogan “truthful, not neutral.” CNN host Dana Bash even wore a shirt on air with the slogan to celebrate Amanpour’s 40th anniversary with CNN. They equate “truthful” with liberal and “democracy” with victory for Democrats.
Ex-CNN host Brian Stelter retweeted an article by former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan chewing out the liberal media for being anti-Biden. We question Sullivan’s grip on the facts of media coverage as she asserted that
(1) News organizations have turned Biden’s old age into a scandal. She touted Vox’s Ian Millhiser comparing Biden’s age to Hillary’s emails in 2016. We have not seen news articles highlighting how Biden’s too old and inform to serve a second term. (Washington Post columnist David Ignatius hinted at it, but that’s not a news story.)
(2) The “evidence-free Biden impeachment efforts” in the House “are presented to news consumers without sufficient context.” What kind of context is “evidence-free” impeachment? Journalists like Sullivan ignore all of the evidence that’s been assembled, especially since Republicans retook the House majority.
(3) Donald Trump is “covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow – his mugshot! His latest insults! – not a perilous threat to democracy.” Media outlets wallowed in the mug shot, not as entertainment, but to suggest he was a common criminal. Due to liberal prodding, Trump is often presented as a threat to democracy.
Finally, after new NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker interviewed Trump, leftist radio host and attention-grabber Dean Obeidallah wailed that “They are helping normalize fascism. It’s that simple.” Obeidallah urged his followers his readers to call NBC and “voice your views on how dangerous booking Trump for this show is.” He tweeted Welker “will lose liberals forever.”
Jim Geraghty at National Review rebutted the whole thing: “There are people in this country who believe that Trump is so dangerous, odious, and unacceptable that a news institution like NBC News is aiding and abetting him just by interviewing him and airing that interview, even if that interview features tough questions, skepticism, rebuttals, etc. It inadvertently reveals an absolute terror that in a free exchange of ideas, the country will make the wrong choice, and a belief that the electorate must be walled off from certain figures, perspectives, and arguments.”
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