It is time for Charlie Pierce to resurrect his retired nickname for Politico: Tiger Beat on the Potomac.
Its coverage lately has been pretty egregious, as Eric Boehlert tweets this morning:
Boehlert’s PressRun post this morning is unsparing on how a national press that let Trump lies slide from his first days in office hammers Biden for not lying to them:
Fact checkers at CNN and the Washington Post are not forced to churn out updates to detail all the “falsehoods” pouring out of the Biden White House. The president has been consistently factual throughout and has taken responsibility for the outcome. He’s also trying to do the right thing by evacuating as many people as possible, while still ending U.S. involvement in a lost military cause.
In that sense, Biden is the anti-Trump, he’s a straight shooter, whether you agree with him or not —and the press is trying to hang him for it.
Trump derided press corps members to their faces and reporters with few exceptions stood there and took it like victims of domestic abuse. Biden’s Ward Cleaver affect has them finding their spines again.
Boehlert cites Susie Madrak on that:
It is because the press’ expectations of Republicans are so low that they cannot disappoint us. Only Democrats can. That’s why so many lefties are forever acting like jilted lovers.
Boehlert sums up Biden’s press coverage:
The press continues to sponsor a one-sided feeding frenzy that’s now well into its second week of doomsday coverage, even though encouraging developments emerge each day — 70,000 people now having been evacuated from Kabul. But that’s not the story the press wants to tell because they don’t want to abandon their preferred, “disaster” narrative. For instance, this doomsday Los Angeles Times write-up about Afghanistan does not include a single sentence about the tens of thousands of people who have been airlifted out of Kabul.
This isn’t just about comparing Biden’s press treatment to Trump’s. It’s about a long-running pattern where Republican liars not only aren’t punished by the press, they’re celebrated.
Indeed, the press covered virtually all of Trump’s daily media circuses in the White House press room. Trump’s press spokespersons lied relentlessly and unapologetically for four years. And “when Biden’s truth-telling team arrived,” Boehlert writes, they turned off the cameras and pulled the plug.
“You always hurt the one you love,” sang the Mills Brothers.