What Is This, North Korea?

At The New Republic Jason Linkins remarks on the tendency of the legacy media to circle the wagons to protect Democratic presidents. After taking note of a recent column at the Washington Post by Dana Milbank:

Over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made considerable waves with a column that rather lustily accused the media of offering President Biden worse coverage than President Trump. At first blush, this might seem impossible, if only because Trump’s actions—through corruption, incompetence, and the need to constantly battle the media—made it almost impossible to cover him favorably. Milbank, however, marshaled some statistics from data analytics experts, who combed through hundreds of thousands of articles to provide a detailed “sentiment analysis” supporting his thesis that “Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as—and for a time worse than—the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.”

But Milbank’s most provocative idea posited that the media needed to be “partisan” in the service of democracy. “The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”

Put me down as siding with Ryan Lizza:

Not everyone took this message well. Politico’s Ryan Lizza responded to Milbank on Twitter: “No respectable model of salvaging democratic norms would include badgering journalists to write only positive stories about the most powerful person in the world.”

I did find this amusing:

Still, if Milbank perhaps muddled his point with his long prelude about the quality of Biden’s coverage, by going out on that limb, he successfully brought attention to a more urgent underlying matter: The GOP is the enemy of democracy, full stop. It’s not Democrats who are waging a well-funded war to suppress the vote, reviving Jim Crow–era electoral tactics, installing apparatchiks and gaming the rules to subvert voter intentions, chasing dedicated election officials out of their posts with threats and intimidation, or fomenting political violence. These are the deeds of Republicans alone, and Milbank’s willingness not to subject the matter to the media’s pathological “both-sides” tendencies should be commended.

He obviously doesn’t live in Illinois. Perhaps he should consider what FiveThirtyEight learned: Democrats benefit more from gerrymandering than Republicans do. I would very much like to see him quantify the effects of the abuses to which he appoints. From my point of view it’s not a case of “both sides do it” but rather that “human beings do it”.

As to the meat of the post, what is this, North Korea? We can’t criticize the Supreme Leader? If we’re that far gone, what democracy are we trying to salvage?