Lately I’ve become somewhat disappointed in the mainstream media – you know, those outlets that are expected to be fair and unbiased in their reporting of the facts?  Two snippets from Thom Hartmann’s newsletter this morning prove that I’m not just imagining things …

— There’s a double standard for Democrats versus Republicans saying stupid things: when Democrats do it, it fills the new cycle for a week; when Republicans do it, we get silence. Donald Trump declared in writing in court this week that, as president, he didn’t have to “support” the Constitution of the US because the word “support” doesn’t appear in the Constitution or his oath of office. This is part of his effort to remain on the 2024 ballot in Colorado, where Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) has sued to keep him off. There are lawsuit is based on the 14th Amendment’s Section 3 that forbids people from holding or running for office when they have engaged in insurrection or given aid and comfort to insurrectionists. Not a single Republican has spoken out about this outrage, and it’s conspicuously absent from our media. If Biden had made such an assertion it would be news from coast-to-coast for a week, but nary a peep from the mainstream media on this one. The double standard at work once again.

and …

— The Trump family is doubling down on Nazi. Imagine how the press would treat the story if Hunter Biden was hosting a Holocaust-denying antisemitic speaker who claimed the “good guys lost” WWII at an event on property owned by his father. Every news network in the country would be there and the story would run nonstop. This guy even managed to kill a person while driving drunk and got off, and Eric Trump is hosting him at an event at Trump’s Miami Doral bedbug palace. He is, by the way, the fourth Holocaust-denying Nazi-loving speaker to have taken the stage at these events. But is the mainstream press covering it at all? Not that I can find. Media Matters has the whole story here: hopefully some real reporters will show up and blow this story wide open, although I’m not holding my breath. There are very, very different standards for Democrats and Republicans in today’s media, in large part because billionaires have thrown so much money into rightwing radio, TV, Internet, social media, message boards, and cable media that they can take any small thing and turn it into a weeks’ worth of outrage that often changes behavior than networks. There is nothing comparable on the left. Other than, I suppose, this newsletter and a few others like it here on Substack and in other media: we’re about as close as you will get, which is a tragedy for American democracy.

I have always been a supporter of a free press, for without that, democracy has little chance of survival, but these days the mainstream media’s biases are like a slap in the face.  While I understand the need for profit, I think it’s sad that our formerly ‘trusted’ sources have become not much above the tabloids.  It’s time, I think, to let them know that we’re not as stupid as they believe and take our business elsewhere if they don’t change their ways!