In Friday's New York Times, their lead National story proved Georgia is still heavily on the paper’s mind and especially the state’s supposedly harsh, racist new restrictions on voting. Political reporters Lisa Lerer and Reid Epstein unloaded on the GOP in “Georgia Governor Sets His Sights on Overcoming Trump’s Wrath.”
Their lead sentence showed a penchant for Democratic hyperbole, as if slightly tightening some voting rules in the state that have been loosened drastically over recent years signified the return of Jim Crow: “Three years ago, Brian Kemp was elected governor when Republicans embraced his nearly decade-long quest to restrict voting access in Georgia. Now he has tied his re-election hopes to making voting in the state even harder.”
The next two graphs weren't any better as they kept up the charade:
After infuriating former President Donald J. Trump by resisting his demands to overturn the state’s election results, Mr. Kemp became an outcast in his own party. He spent weeks fending off a daily barrage of attacks from right-wing media, fellow Republican lawmakers and party officials, and Mr. Trump vowed to retaliate by sending a hard-right loyalist to oppose him in the primary next year.
But the sweeping new voting bill Mr. Kemp signed two weeks ago has provided a lifeline to the embattled governor to rebuild his standing among the party’s base. The bill severely curtails the ability to vote in Georgia, particularly for people of color. Mr. Kemp has seized on it as a political opportunity, defending the law as one that expands voting access, condemning those who criticize it and conflating the criticism with so-called cancel culture.
Let's pause for briefing but important fact check: The law does not "severely curtail the ability to vote in Georgia.”
Continuing to keep their guns turned on Kemp, they did what they've almost certainly not done with Democrats during the Trump-Russia probe, which was gripe about someone's number of interviews and TV appearances (click “expand”):
Since signing the bill into law on March 25, Mr. Kemp has done roughly 50 interviews, 14 with Fox News, promoting the new restrictions with messaging that aligns with Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was rigged against him.
(....)
A political ascent would represent an unlikely turnaround for Mr. Kemp, making him the most prominent Republican to find a way to overcome Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution, and perhaps providing an early test of the former president’s ability to impose his will on the party’s electoral future.
Mr. Kemp’s argument is designed to pump adrenaline into the conservative vein, by focusing on two of the most animating topics of the political right: election mechanics and an ominous portrayal of the Democratic left.
(....)
The new law Mr. Kemp is championing makes it harder to acquire an absentee ballot, creates new restrictions and complications for voting and hands sweeping new power over the electoral process to Republican legislators. It has drawn harsh criticism from local companies like Coca-Cola and Delta, and prompted Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game out of suburban Atlanta as a form of protest.
Those “restrictions and complications” exist in blue states as well, including Minnesota and Colorado (where Major League Baseball just relocated its All-Star game). The Times just won’t cover them.
Leaning hard into the racism lie, Lerer and Epstein concluded by allowing a Democrat to go unchallenged in accusing Kemp of playing racial politics:
Democrats say his ardent support of the law and attacks on [Stacey] Abrams are a cynical effort to bolster his standing among his conservative base while suppressing votes for his general election opponents.
“This is all politics,” said Representative Nikema Williams, the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, who replaced the civil rights icon John Lewis in Congress. “Let’s also be clear that a part of that politics is keeping Black and brown people away from the polls so he can continue to win elections in Georgia.”
