Police and Thieves

Last week I wrote in these pages about the complicity of the mainstream media in the ongoing Republican attempt to undermine American democracy. That high-pitched squealing you hear is the sound of several howling examples on display in the days that followed.

Let’s dive in.

From Genesis to Revelation

In The New Yorker — about as mainstream as American media gets — the usually very savvy David Rohde has a profile of US Senator Angus King of Maine, one of only two independents in that once-august body. (The other more famous one, not coincidentally, is also from New England, a certain B. Sanders.) With all due respect to Mr. Rohde, his piece traffics in exactly the kind of destructive bothsidesism that I bemoaned last week, and that plagued the US media in the 2016 election, and that continues to do so with even more dangerous consequences as we speak.

Here’s the operative paragraph:

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, told me that both sides are increasingly playing to their political base. Joe Biden, after months of largely ignoring his predecessor, has begun calling out Trump and his Republican enablers. In a recent speech in Georgia, the President compared opponents of the voting-rights bills to Bull Connor, the notorious commissioner of public safety in Birmingham…