UNEXPECTEDLY: Media Calls for ‘Rules’ Treating Republicans as Not ‘Normal.’
While we see media going to all kinds of Orwellian lengths to defend the failures of Joe Biden, the opposite side of the coin is how much media will spin reality to attack Republicans.
Now, we’ve seen bias when it comes to media. But the Washington Post’s Jen Rubin exceeds bias and moves right into outright lunacy with this mad rant at Republicans.
First, she falsely claims that the Republican Party has been endorsing violence. But then she gets to the meat of what she wants to say — that the media has to have “rules” for how they treat Republicans. Now, I will give you a “Jen Rubin” warning going in. You’ve been warned.
“You have to have new ground rules for the media,” Rubin whines. “They have to stop treating Republicans like normal politicians. They are not normal politicians … This is a party that spends its entire time cooking up ridiculous culture memes & fanning violence & coming up with outright lies.” Then the MSNBC host completely endorses the crazy idea, shaking her head ‘yes’ and telling Rubin she’s completely right.
That’s quite a take for someone appearing on the network that employs Al Sharpton. But we’ve been here before multiple times; in June of 2020 Reason’s Matt Welch noted: Journalists Abandoning ‘Objectivity’ for ‘Moral Clarity’ Really Just Want To Call People Immoral.
Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer-prize-winning correspondent for the 60 Minutes offshoot 60 in 6, has the latest and perhaps loudest in a recent series of think-pieces extolling the virtues of newsroom revolts such as the one that erupted at The New York Times earlier this month after its opinion pages published a controversial piece by Sen. Tom Cotton (R – Ark.).
Lowery and his industry allies contend that the national tumult stemming from the police killing of George Floyd is a prime opportunity to overhaul journalism’s very mission statement. “Neutral objectivity” as an aspiration, he argues in a Times essay, has failed, and should be replaced by “moral clarity.”
“Moral clarity would insist that politicians who traffic in racist stereotypes and tropes—however cleverly—be labeled such with clear language and unburied evidence,” Lowery writes. “Racism, as we know, is not about what lies in the depths of a human’s heart. It is about word and deed. And a more aggressive commitment to truth from the press would empower our industry to finally admit that.”
This proposed objectivity-for-morality swap is gaining momentum in the spaces where professional journalists congregate, pontificate, and/or swarm on Twitter to get senior managers fired.
Newsrooms “are really struggling to cover…in a way that appears to be nonpartisan a kind of political landscape where one political party in many ways has gone rogue and is not following the rules,” the Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning Nikole Hannah-Jones said on CNN’s Reliable Sources after the Cotton flap, in which she was a driving figure. “This adherence to even-handedness, both-sidesism, the View from Nowhere, doesn’t actually work in the political circumstances that we’re in.”
And then there was ABC in 2004:
An internal memo written by ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin admonishes ABC staff: During coverage of Democrat Kerry and Republican Bush not to “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable.”
The controversial internal memo obtained by DRUDGE, captures Halperin stating how “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”
But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”
“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.
Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.
Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”
In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”
That was also the year that the New York Times’ then-ombudsman admitted the obvious: “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”
Between articles like that, ABC’s admission in 2004, Rubin’s appearance on MSNBC, and journalists preening on social media, it’s good to see the legacy media admitting that they’re simply Democratic Party operatives with bylines, though.
Related: John Kass, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, asks and answers: Why is corporate legacy media dying? Danchenko indictment and collapsing Russia Hoax narrative reveal the answer: Root Rot.