Eric Boehlert: The Washington Post owes Biden an apology

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6. The media is mostly critical to stir up readers.

Reporting competence generates no controversy. So when there’s no controversy, they try to create it. That is not good journalism, but we have very little of that these days. We have clickbait headlines, “conservative” opinion pieces that bear to relationship to truth or reality, and Republican talking points reported as if they were based on facts instead of lies.

Ross Douthat wrote in the NYT recently that crime is up significantly (a fact) but blamed it on two reasons only. The first was police being discouraged to do their jobs because of all the protests against them, not mentioning BLM protests but certainly inferring that they’re part of the blame for more crime because police are too upset to do their jobs. His second reason was the lockdowns because of the virus, which has an element of fact, but he left out that domestic abuse has seen an uptick from more time at home and from having easy access to guns to kill partners—no mention that it is Republicans who refused to renew the Violence Against Women Act or to do anything to keep guns out of the hands of known abusers. Nor did Douthat mention the crimes caused by Trump, from the insurrection to attacks on Asian Americans to the daily mass murders by angry men whipped up by Republican propaganda and easy gun access. We have very little truth in media these days.