Brit Hume dared me not to laugh out loud on reading this querulous PuffHo pearl-clutching (not to worry, the link is to
RedState, with an excerpt):
As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on Friday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.
“Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?” the reporter said.
[T]he reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality.
Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.
“The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,” said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. “They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.”
If Americans and their allies were not being slaughtered right now, I'd feel more glee about the spectacle of these clowns' new outrage over journalists' "criticism-masquerading-as-query," loss of "neutrality," "rush to judgment," and "frenzy." Next the White House will be calling them political operatives with bylines.
"Hey, guys, can I get another scoop of that neutrality?"
6 comments:
Ed Driscoll at Instapundit linked the Telegraph column that starts the RedState post (https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/469224/).
I think Douglas Murray makes a distinction with no difference. It may be that the media started campaigning for Biden at some point but a large part of the 'Trump show' was them campaigning against him for four years.
This is hilarious especially given the proliferation of the "There is no evidence that..." line in the news media over the last year or so. Generally there is lots of evidence "that...", just not incontrovertible proof; but the media has stepped up to declare dissent off the board all the same, and on a wide variety of topics.
Apparently this counts as 'both sideism,' perhaps because the media sometimes explains the other view before asserting that there's no evidence for it.
It is sad and frightening that they really believe this counts as both-sideism over the last 50 years. Their narcissism is so thorough that even letting another POV to the table is regarded as undue favoritism.
As with our growing understanding that a bully does not suffer from "low self-esteem" but from an inflated self-esteem that cannot endure contact with a reality that does not reinforce it, so the impression of liberals is that any contradiction is perceived as a wound. We have seen this in milder forms over the last decades - we did not think they were milder forms at the time - but the behavior on college campuses and in particular urban centers has revealed it can get much worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_rage_and_narcissistic_injury
Stalin, remember, thought that the Ukrainian peasants were intentionally starving themselves in order to make him look bad. A truly frightening example of how far the human mind can go in terms of rationalisation.
Yes, we should be so lucky as to acquire a press corps that would engage in a bit of both-sideism now and then.
"Rage and narcissistic injury"...I wonder how much this has to do with the focus on "self-esteem" in education?
Amusingly that narcissistic injury is exactly the claim they try to pin on their opponents under the name of “white fragility.”
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