That comparison is making the rounds on social media today. I think you can easily see why. The mainstream media continues to sane-wash Donald Trump.
As S.V. Date writes in this piece for Huffington Post, there is a book to be written about press failure in 2024 but it isn’t about Biden’s abilities:
The great irony is that there absolutely was malfeasance by the media in its coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign — not in how it covered the sitting president, but in how it covered the challenger.
Donald Trump assaulted the Constitution he had sworn to defend after he lost reelection in 2020. He invited his followers to Washington long after the votes had been counted, whipped them up into an angry mob and then sicced them on his own vice president and Congress to coerce them into awarding him a second term.
It was the closest America has come to losing our democracy since the first year of the Civil War. Yet within weeks of Jan. 6, 2021, reporters began making the trek to Mar-a-Lago to interview him and somehow managed to file stories that elided the day entirely. I recall listening to a podcast interview with one who was asked how Trump had explained his behavior on Jan. 6, and the reporter replied that the topic had not come up.
I was and remain dumbfounded by that.
Crazy. And completely absurd. But it wasn’t unusual.
As a young reporter, I used to cover criminals full time. The idea of agreeing to a jailhouse interview of a suspect with the understanding that I would not detail the charges against him in the story never would have occurred to me. Even if it had, my editors never would have tolerated such an arrangement.
And yet by late spring 2022, that is precisely what started happening. The political press corps began normalizing the hell out of Donald Trump. They downplayed or flat-out ignored the fundamental violence he had committed against our democracy in their coverage in return for the possibility of an interview or even just anonymous quotes from top advisers.
(Because, really, what kind of reporter are you if you can’t publish a few hours ahead of time whether Trump is going to call Gov. Ron DeSantis “Meatball Ron” or “Fat Ron” in his rally speech?)
Just as one example: Trump, unlike every other modern presidential nominee, refused to take a traveling press pool with him. Instead, he and his staff handpicked reporters for each trip. You can probably guess which reporters were invited and which ones weren’t.
There was an implicit understanding that access to the Republican nominee meant you would not portray him as a fundamental, proven threat to American democracy. Which, of course, he was back then, and which he continues to prove himself to be now on a near-daily basis.
As he goes to some lengths to emphasize, none of this is to downplay the massive influence of the right wing media. We are all too well aware of what and who they are.
That said, repetition across a broad swath of the media matters. If reminders of Trump’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6 had been repeated as frequently as, say, Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private email server, who knows what might have happened. A non coup-attempting, pro-democracy nominee could well have emerged from the Republican primary.
[…]
The political media’s efforts to normalize him notwithstanding, it was plain from all of Trump’s open talk about revenge and his vows to grab extra-constitutional power that America was risking a slide into autocracy if voters returned him to the White House.
An even sadder truth is that, faced with a choice between democracy and the promise of cheaper Doritos, America went with the Doritos.
We were never going to get the latter, and, as is becoming clearer by the day, we’ll be lucky to get through this with some semblance of the former.
And they’re still doing it. Just look at that NY TImes headline.