Nate Silver tweets on which candidates he thinks political journalists favor

[Princetonian]

5. In one case where a candidate is the target of an ugly "smear campaign" this has been insidious.

It just shows,” says Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, “that launching a smear campaign is the only response to the truth.”

Gabbard, 38, burst into headlines after a July 31 Democratic Party presidential debate, when she went after California Senator Kamala Harris’s record as Attorney General of the State of California. The “smear campaign” refers to the bizarre avalanche of negative press that ensued, as reporters seemed to circle wagons around a Harris, a party favorite.

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Having wounded a presumptive frontrunner backed by nearly $25 million in campaign funds, Gabbard instantly became the subject of a slew of negative leaks, tweets, and press reports. Many of these continued the appalling recent Democratic Party tradition of denouncing anything it doesn’t like as treasonous aid to foreign enemies.

Harris national press chair Ian Sams tweeted, “Yo, you love Assad!”, a reference to Gabbard’s controversial visit with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017. He then tweeted a link to an insidious February 2 NBC News story, which asserted that Gabbard’s campaign was the beneficiary of Russian bots.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/podcast-tulsi-gabbard-kamala-harris-syria-iraq-870003/

To set the record straight:

".... Gabbard agreed to meet with Trump to make her case for a noninterventionist foreign policy. A few months later, she flew to Syria and met with Bashar al-Assad, who is presiding over a brutal civil war; she and he seemed to agree that the United States should not intervene to stop it."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/what-does-tulsi-gabbard-believe