The media ‘cover’ Joe Biden the way a protection racket does

New York Post ^ | October 19, 2020 | Rich Lowry

[karpov]

Joe Biden is the most cosseted presidential candidate in memory.

He has run a minimalist campaign that has avoided the press as much as possible, while the press hasn’t been braying for more access and answers, but eager to avoid anything that could be discomfiting to the campaign.

Never before have the media been so openly fearful of asking or reporting something that might hurt a presidential candidate. What are supposed to be the animating values of our adversarial press — informing the public, getting answers, holding the powerful to account — have all been subordinated to the protection racket that is coverage of Joe Biden.

Even the lowest common denominator of news — simply being interesting — has been tossed aside. Boring and uneventful is the new newsworthy. This presumably isn’t how they teach it in journalism school, but no one has had trouble adjusting.

The tendency reached a new level in the media’s handling of New York Post reports on e-mails obtained from a laptop that Hunter Biden reportedly left off at a Delaware repair shop.

Here was a story with enough mysteries and plotlines to keep a couple of newsrooms busy. Are the e-mails, putting Hunter Biden’s sleazy overseas business dealings in a more sinister light, legitimate? Did Hunter really take the laptop to the shop and forget about it? And, more important, what do the e-mails say about what Joe Biden knows or should have known about Hunter’s work that depended so heavily on proximity to the vice president?

Instead, the press has been ­uninterested at best and hostile at worst. It’s the opposite of a feeding frenzy. The media have deployed their bomb-disposal unit for fear that a potentially explosive story might detonate.

What Biden has to say about the e-mails is inherently of interest.

[Liz]

One and the same.