The party’s over in Milwaukee, but the Democrat crisis is ongoing. This year's Republican convention drew surprisingly calm coverage compared to the hostile norm, in part due to the attempt to kill Donald Trump. Meanwhile, on some days, the GOP news was submerged to cover Democrats deep in a crisis as more politicians call on Joe Biden to end his campaign.
The convention itself had a serious message discipline. Journalists seemed frustrated it wasn't more negative-sounding. We have several measurements of a double standard in convention coverage.
Tone. To the media, the Republican convention is always dark and hateful and ultraconservative. The Democrats are always inspirational. The usual objection to the tone erupted in spurts, just because it’s a habit. But there were a lot of moments of real emotional connection that they often found hard to ignore. The mothers who lost children to illegal-immigrant crime. The parents of American hostages in Gaza. The Gold Star families from Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco. Some networks tried to ignore them. MSNBC talked right over the Gold Star families as they spoke.
Inclusion. The Republican convention is always narrowcasting to a fringy base, while the Democrats have a "big tent." The DNC Media or the DEI Media are always policing the minority voters to make sure they don’t cross the street to vote Republican. When Republicans try to attract black voters, liberal journalists go on the attack. On MSNBC, Joy Reid complained about black men wanting to be "white-adjacent." On CNN, Van Jones said about black Republican convention speakers: "All four of them sounded like black people who talk about black people, but don’t talk to black people.” Now imagine how these concepts would sound if we reversed them.
Fact-Checking. The "fact police" always get extremely active when Republicans talk, because liberals think it's preposterous that, say, Joe Biden believes in open borders. Or that, this is weird, you can’t call Kamala Harris a border czar. PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders appeared on PBS to claim the "border czar" thing was just a GOP nickname. But news stories at the time reported Harris was expected to help reduce the flow of immigration, which didn't happen. The "fact checkers" are docile around Democrats, even as they insist Trump and the Republicans will end democracy.
Controversy. Usually, the media play up any divisions between Republicans, like in fights over platform language. That was prevented before the convention began. All week, the real controversy was the struggle to get President Biden to quit.
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