Maher: The Times buried the Kavanaugh assassination story because he’s a conservative

“They just wear their bias on their sleeves,” he says here of the paper, “and if it’s not part of something that feeds our narrative, f— it, we bury it.”

I’m sticking with my bet that Joe Rogan ends up fully red-pilled before Maher does. But I admit, clips like this make me wonder.

Apologies for the odd French-language embedded tweet but it’s the only one I could find with the full exchange between him and his guests.

His point is true beyond a shadow of a doubt and has been for a long time. It’s a neat follow-up to yesterday’s post about media gatekeeping, in fact. Partisan media aggressively filters the news it covers to shield its audience from information that might shake their faith in “the team.” But big media filters too, even when it feels obliged to pay some attention to major developments that disfavor their own side. A gunman showing up outside Sonia Sotomayor’s home would be big news, illustrating a right-wing “climate of hate.” Whereas a gunman showing up outside Brett Kavanaugh’s home is a page-20 curio about a random lunatic.

Katrina Trinko remembers how the Gabby Giffords shooting, perpetrated by a genuine random lunatic, was immediately and egregiously coopted by the media as an indictment of tea-party agitation against Democrats. But the supreme example of the double standard will forever be the attempt by an ardent Bernie-loving progressive to mass-murder Republican congressmen on a baseball field in 2017, news that would have been treated as a national trauma on the order of a major terrorist attack had the partisan roles been reversed. As it is, the story fizzled after a few days and probably would have fizzled sooner if not for the subplot of Steve Scalise fighting for his life in the hospital. Trinko:

[W]hen it comes to political violence in the United States today, here’s a maxim you can always rely on: If the victim or likely victim is on the right, the perpetrator is simply a lone wolf. But if the victim or likely victim is on the left, the perpetrator was fueled by dangerous rhetoric…

Sure, the justices have been given some additional security. But where is the outrage from top liberal lawmakers and activists? Where are the calls for people to remember that at the end of the day, no matter how vehemently we disagree on certain policies, we are all Americans who should be working together to resolve our differences?…

Here’s the reality: Corporate media and liberal lawmakers probably aren’t going to rush to highlight the horrific assassination attempt on Kavanaugh. They know that moderates will be horrified to discover how commonplace it has become for Supreme Court justices to face protests at home. (Notice how little coverage the corporate media has given to these protests, despite the fact that they are publicly announced ahead of time.) And they don’t want to risk alienating the extremists on their own side by focusing on this.

Left-wing agitators understand that they operate free of scrutiny from major media. It’s why the same group that doxxed the Court’s conservative members last month felt no compunction about advertising a new protest at Amy Coney Barrett’s home even after the news broke about a threat to Kavanaugh.

 

Because they’re of the left, by definition they can’t be part of a “climate of hate” that places anyone at risk. If anyone takes a shot at Barrett, the takeaway will be nothing more profound that that there are some crazy people in America. It’s the progressive version of the strategy some righties engage in after mass shootings, complaining about poor treatment for mental health in order to steer the debate away from gun policies favored by Republicans. When your side is on the political hot seat, you can’t go wrong changing the subject to the unfathomable nuances of a murderer’s mental illness.

In lieu of an exit question, read Jonah Goldberg today on a glaring example of politically motivated gatekeeping by major conservative media. Or read this, about Trump’s “free speech” platform allegedly refusing to allow certain topics to be broached. Taken together with the Times’s inexcusable downplaying of the Kavanaugh story, they help explain why the GOP is in the state that it is. Conservatives justifiably distrust major media due to its biases, they place their trust in partisan media instead, and then partisan media grossly abuses that trust by distorting or outright suppressing information that conservatives should have.