Double standards? Media did Biden's bidding. Now they freak out over Trump. | Opinion

The weekend before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, “Saturday Night Live’s” cold open featured a fictional panel of progressive MSNBC journalists. At numerous intervals, their commentary was interrupted by breaking news alerts over any minute thing Trump had said or put on social media. 

It’s funny because it’s true. It also highlights a troubling double standard within the legacy news media. 

Two recent revelations offer examples of just how disparately the media approached covering former President Joe Biden – and how it once again covers Trump.

When it came to Biden, too many journalists tossed their curiosity out the window, accepting whatever came out of the White House as truth.

Even worse, some publications actively sought to curry favor with the Biden administration, and in doing so helped hide information from the public that the president didn’t want to get out − whether that related to the origins of COVID-19, his son Hunter’s laptop or to his declining mental and physical health. 

That’s the opposite of what the media should be doing. 

Can you imagine the outrage that would follow if journalists sought to do the same with Trump? The same standard should apply, regardless of who is president.

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News outlet decided to ignore Hunter Biden laptop story

The latest revelations aren’t “news” per se, and I’ve written frequently about the mainstream news media’s lackluster coverage of the Biden administration. But they provide additional contrast to how the press is now covering Trump. 

A recent podcast interview involving two former Politico reporters sheds light on how decisions were made by editors to either quash negative stories about the Biden family or to slow-roll their publication. 

The worst example came from Marc Caputo (now with Axios). In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, the New York Post broke the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained evidence of his shady business dealings and influence peddling.

While Politico was happy to run an article calling the news “disinformation,” just as Biden himself described the matter, it was not interested in pursuing the matter any further. 

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“I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop,’” Caputo recalled. “And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least.”

Politico, of course, was far from alone in not giving the Hunter laptop story any credence. Pretty much all major news outlets refused to acknowledge its veracity until Biden was safely in the White House and Trump defeated. 

Trump administration releases report on COVID-19 origins. Biden hid it.

The media also worked in lockstep to tamp down the possibility that COVID-19 could have originated in a lab. That’s because it was Trump and other Republicans who expressed their concern about a lab leak. 

So, they were painted as kooky conspiracy theorists by the media. 

It turns out Trump and Co. were probably right. An increasing number of experts now say a lab leak is the more likely origin of the global pandemic.

Just days into the new Trump administration, for example, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released an assessment that a lab leak is the more likely cause of the pandemic. The FBI came to the same conclusionseveral years ago. 

The CIA's  “low confidence” assessment had taken place under the Biden administration, but Biden officials didn’t bother letting the public know.

A more skeptical media would have tried harder to get to the truth. 

We’re less than two weeks into the Trump administration, but the difference in media treatment could not be more night and day. While the media’s instinct under Biden was to take him at his word, the opposite is true with Trump.

The fact-checkers are back in force and journalists are playing hardball. Watch Vice President JD Vance’s weekend interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” and try to picture host Margaret Brennan asking pointed questions like that of Joe Biden or former Vice President Kamala Harris.

To Trump’s credit, he does not shy away from the press – unlike his predecessor, who essentially hid from the media for years. 

Journalists should be tough yet fair with the new president. When there is such a clear double standard in coverage, though, it’s hard to take them seriously.