Rich Lowry of National Review Online describes a “protection racket” for the Democratic presidential nominee.
Joe Biden is the most cosseted presidential candidate in memory.
He’s run a minimalist campaign that’s 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 has 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 emails obtained from a laptop that Hunter Biden reportedly left off at a Delaware computer repair shop.
Here was a story with enough mysteries and plot lines to keep a couple of newsrooms busy. Are the emails, 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 emails 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 has deployed its bomb disposal unit for fear that a potentially explosive story might detonate.
