The media completely dropped the ball on George Santos – and it’s trying to scapegoat the Democrats for it
How biased is the mainstream media is against the Democrats? We keep endlessly hearing from major media outlets (even from left leaning MSNBC) about how embarrassing it supposedly is that the Democratic Party couldn’t manage to uncover George Santos’ scandals before election day. But the media isn’t bothering to point out that the Republicans didn’t even vet their own candidate.
Most major media outlets chase political “credibility” by presenting both sides as if they were the same. It allows them to give the appearance of being unbiased, which they can use as a shield against almost any credibility questions: “Hey, we’re equally hard on both sides!”
But as a statement of fact, both sides are not the same. And these days it’s not strictly a moral difference between the inherent empathy and decency of the left and the inherent selfishness of the right. The reality of this era is that the Democratic Party runs a tight ship with relatively little individual corruption and virtually no public infighting, even as the Republican Party is largely a cesspool of corruption, offensive behavior, nonstop lies, outright criminality, and cartoon villains.
It is now impossible for the media to portray both sides as the same, without being outright dishonest about it. Major mainstream media outlets now have to bend over backward to downplay the Republicans’ corruption, ineptness, and failures, even while coming down inappropriately hard on the Democrats for every minor real or invented imperfection.
The media is now so locked into this mindset that when it was revealed that an incoming House Republican had allegedly made up nearly every aspect of his life, the media’s first instinct was to blame the Democrats for not having managed to expose the guy sooner. The media is overlooking the obvious story here, which is that the Republican Party is so overwhelmingly and inherently corrupt, no one within its ranks even cared if one of its own House candidates was essentially a fictional character.
Of course the major media outlets are also trying to cover for the fact that they failed to vet a major party candidate in a competitive House race. Isn’t that what the media is supposed to do? Major news outlets have personnel who are assigned specifically to digging up these kinds of political scandals. Yet not one reporter at one major news outlet managed to crack this story before election day? Either Santos was really good at disguising his lies, or the media did its job terribly ineptly this past election cycle.
Either way, the media is now scapegoating the Democratic Party by blaming it for not having done the media’s job. That’s unacceptable, and absurd. The Democrats may have been too busy saving democracy and working for the people to have caught onto Santos’ lies. But the Democrats will still surely review this internally and figure out how to make sure this kind of Republican coverup never gets past them again. The question is, what is the media doing to make sure it doesn’t drop the ball like this again? So far all we’re hearing from the media is deflection – and that’s not good enough.
