The media would like the Felon to feel safe in his station

As I’ve written many times, for society to flourish crime and injustice should be unsafe in any station — nobody of any rank should be above the law. This is a difficult thing to accomplish in the best times; it’s worse with a president who’s entire life has demonstrated that if someone as rich as he is breaks the law, very few people want to make him unsafe.

The media should play a part in unsafety, exposing wrongdoing and flaying it unmercifully. Instead, they’ve been consistently willing to cut the Republican Daddy party some slack, particularly FOTUS. For example by refusing to call a spade a spade

Or consider DHS Secretary Kristi Noem having California Senator Alex Padilla dragged out of her presentation because he dared question her. The NYT doesn’t mention that she lied about him not identifying himself and puts him in the context of “volatile responses” to the administration’s actions. Or Chris Cillizza (who wrote endless stories about Hilary Clinton’s bad email practices back in 2016) declaring that Padilla confronting Noem was just as bad as her agents assaulting him. The Daddy Party gets to act tough; the Mommy Party better show some respect.

As someone said online, if Biden had ordered Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene dragged out of a press conference in handcuffs, the NYT would never have left him live it down. Or if he’d sent in troops after a state government defied him. Or if a Democrat lied about a shooter targeting elected Republicans.

There’s also an assumption in the press that everyone respects the Daddy Party, that the administration threatening to overthrow California’s government, is a bit of wildly popular badassery. As Paul Krugman says, it isn’t popular, but it is a terrifying threat to democracy. So is arresting members of congress for not collaborating.

And it’s not just the current conflict in California. They’ve constantly sanewashing the Felon (talk of occupying Greenland is “teasing”) and RFK Jr. Using the military against protesters is a radical step but Politico describes it as the Felon “leveraging his role as commander-in-chief in a much clearer and more urgent way than during his first term.” More like a bureaucratic exercise than an act of tyranny. And it’s laying the groundwork for much worse, if not now then soon.

Some of this is undoubtedly fear that the Felon will sue them, or won’t grant them whatever favors their parent company seeks, if they don’t take his side. Some of it may be press ineptitude — I remember an NYT reporter during the W years saying they didn’t want to challenge W’s WMD claims because he was the president, we were at war and it was all so intimidating! Part of it may be that the media skew more conservative than stereotype. There’s the fondness for the horse-race approach, where, as James Fallows says, the emphasis is on “how it plays,” not the ethics or legality of it. And some of it is definitely the view from nowhere approach to journalism, where taking sides would be biased and wrong. Even if one side is indeed much worse than the other.

This may be one explanation why, as the Lawyers, Guns and Money comment below says, the media make us fight each election on Republican terms.

I’m not sure ownership is the root cause but I think the slant is real.