Thread by @JeffRoushPoetry

This is an interesting article, and not wrong, but I think it’s a little beside the point. Whether Biden is treated better or worse by the press, he is simply a qualitatively different president from Trump.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

The press should be an active force to reveal the truth in our cities, states, nation, and world. They don’t owe it to any politician to be positive or “nice.” The problem is that they are continuing to treat this as merely opposing political forces with different ideals.

That simply isn’t the state of our nation. The former president is a liar and a fraud, who served and serves only himself: his power, his financial interests, and his ego. But his daily idiocy provided shiny objects for the press to chase, for clicks in a 24-hour cycle.

Biden, in contrast, is steady, and doesn’t feed into the clickbait cycle. So the press seeks conflict and dissension, turning the complexities of leadership in a toxic political environment and inherited messes into blown-up notions of failure.

Beyond feeding the incessantly short-term focus of our news cycles, our media outlets are seeking to provide not actual fairness, but the impression of fairness. Bruised by the constant attacks from the prior administration, there is a bias toward looking “balanced.”

It’s all an illusion. There is no balance to be found between navigating a dangerous evacuation of Afghanistan and trying to overturn a US election; between exacerbating a pandemic through lies and trying to move a nation toward vaccination against it.

Dissenting voices within a party are part of “usual” politics—because people working toward the best solutions will differ in their ideas of what those solutions should be. But when one party has no interest in solutions, that normal dissension isn’t going to be there.

The attempts to cover politics in the usual ways simply don’t apply here. And to be fair, some get it; @NicolleDWallace, for example, does a great job of revealing the GOP opposition to democracy in every show. But we need more.

Freedom of the press exists because a press unencumbered by government control should be able to shine the light of truth on those in power. False equivalencies between a party arguing about the best solutions and a party seeking to shut down democracy shine no such light.

So hold Biden accountable to the people. Just don’t pretend that there are two parties with competing ideas to lift our nation; one party seeks only to destroy and entrench its own power, and nitpicking the current president without that context is a disservice to the country.