Whenever a Republican candidate loses a big election to a Democrat, he or she is expected to bow out gracefully and quietly to allow people in the liberal media to bask in the glow of being on the winning side.
However, when a member of the Grand Old Party wins the contest, those same people in the press obviously feel justified in venting their frustration by downplaying the significance of the election.
That was the case on Tuesday evening in Mississippi, where Washington Post reporters Matt Viser and David Weigel did their best to undercut the victory of Republican Senator-elect Cindy Hyde-Smith over black Democrat Mike Espy by using racially charged terms throughout their article on the election.
Viser and Weigel apparently couldn’t even make it past the headline without hurling an obvious slam by declaring that the GOP candidate won the “racially charged election.”
Not surprisingly, the reporters slammed Hyde-Smith as “overcoming a surprisingly strong challenge” from Espy to nevertheless become “the state’s first elected female U.S. senator.”
Right from the start, Viser and Weigel hammered the Republican candidate for her “comments about being willing to join a supporter on the front row of a public hanging.”
After allowing Hyde-Smith to claim that she won because “Mississippians know me, and they know my heart,” the reporters expressed their distaste for the fact that the win “bolsters the Republican majority in the Senate and illustrates President Trump’s ability to rally his supporters behind a struggling campaign.”
But when dealing with Espy, the reporters waited until the 24th paragraph to refer to any “accusations of ethical lapses.”
Even then, The Post newsmen tried to soften the blow by claiming the Democrat -- “who resigned from his position in President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet amid an investigation” into claims that “he improperly accepted gifts” -- was “acquitted on 30 corruption charges, but Republicans ran ads calling him ‘too corrupt for the Clintons.’”
After groaning that a win would have made Espy “the state’s first African American senator since Reconstruction,” Weigel and Viser stated that he “ran the state’s most competitive Democratic campaign for U.S. Senate in decades” but “fell short in his efforts to bring historic numbers of black voters to the polls.”
“Throughout the campaign,” they noted, Espy “tried to walk a fine line on matters of race, attempting to galvanize black voters in a state with a greater proportion of them than any other, while not alienating white voters, who turn out in disproportionately high numbers.”
The reporters were quick to mention that Espy -- in a speech conceding the race -- said he was proud of his campaign:
When this many people show up, when this many people stand up, when this many people speak up, it is not a loss. It is a moment. So we are not going to stop moving our state forward.
Nevertheless, “Espy’s campaign executed its turnout strategy, running ahead of its Nov. 6 vote in nearly every county,” the Post reporters added. “He was on track to carry all 25 of the state’s majority-black counties, most by bigger margins than he’d won in the first round.”
As if the bias from Viser and Weigel wasn’t obvious enough, they noted that “Republicans were not fully confident heading into Tuesday, even in a state that Trump carried by 18 points in 2016 and where Democrats have not won a Senate race since 1982.”
The newsmen also noted that the “country’s heaviest political hitters had weighed in on the final federal race of the 2018 midterms.”
“My name may not be on the ballot,” former President Barack Obama said. “But our future is, and that’s why I believe this is one of the most important elections in our lifetime.”
This report from Viser and Weigel clearly demonstrates that as far as the Washington Post is concerned, when Republicans win, it’s due to some terrible outside force like racism. However, when Democrats lose, it’s just time for liberals to start planning for the next big political contest.
