The Schumer Example of Media Bias
The press will never treat Schumer's comments the way they would comments by McConnell or any other Republican
There’s no need to belabor the point here. I will get right to it and you can get on with your day.
Yesterday, during a rally in support of murdering children in front of the Supreme Court — and yes, let’s stop dancing around euphemism. Abortion is murdering a human child — Senator Chuck Schumer threatened two Supreme Court Justices. In his speech before a friendly crowd, Schumer said,
I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
A month ago, Chuck Schumer took to the floor of the United States Senate to denounce President Trump’s attacks on the Supreme Court. Yesterday, Schumer went to the Supreme Court to actually threaten, by name, two members of the Court.
Here’s the point.
If Senator Mitch McConnell, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, or prominent unelected Republican no-name had said what Schumer said about any progressive member of the Court, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, McClatchy, Politico, and more would be shoving microphones in the faces of every elected Republican everywhere demanding to know if they agreed with or would repudiate the statement.
Remember, when a no-named Republican staffer on her personal Facebook page criticized the behavior of President Obama’s daughters at a White House event, the media mob got her fired and reporters camped out at her parents’ home.
When President Trump attacked a federal judge, reporters from the above-mentioned networks demanded other Republicans go on record affirming or denouncing the President.
When President Trump last year criticized the federal courts for bias against him, Chief Justice Roberts repudiated President Trump and the various reporters at various outlets demanded to know which side various Republicans were on and did they reject President Trump’s views on the judiciary.
Reporters are going to tut-tut Chuck Schumer. They’ll say what he said. They’ll say what the Chief Justice said. They may even compare Schumer’s attacks on the Court to the President’s. They will insist they covered it. But don’t hold your breath on the media ambushing a bunch of prominent Democrats to find out if they agree with Schumer or not. They only do that to Republicans.
Consider Politico, which ran articles blaming the GOP for politicizing of coronavirus while running a cartoon of a man committing suicide when he found out Trump was in charge of mitigating coronavirus. They ran this first thing this morning:
Then there is NBC News from yesterday, which ran this:
“Schumer’s comments” would have been “attacks” or “threats” had Mitch McConnell said it.
Schumer, for his part overnight, has doubled down. Note that the media has chosen to go with the “Schumer said vs. Roberts said” line as opposed to going with Schumer actually threatening Supreme Court justices and demanding Democrats agree or disagree with him.
By the way, a sub-example of this media bias is that the conservatives on the Supreme Court are far less predictable than the progressive members, but the media never pays attention to the lockstep leftwing uniformity of the four progressive members of the Court while obsessively handwringing about the variability of the five center-right Justices. An awful lot of coverage of the Court casts a critical eye on the center-right Justices who are individually likely to join the four progressives. The media never critically points out the four progressive Justices are the most predictable and reliably ideological members of the Court.
Why? Because a reliable progressive bias, particularly on social and cultural issues, is a good thing to the secular hedonists of the press who employ, among others, a legal “scholar” who impregnated a co-worker’s daughter then demanded she have an abortion while refusing to pay child support costs.
I saw it on The Hill; just goes to show the importance of reading a variety of media. But you're right, it will be downplayed or deemed "posturing." Which it may well have been, but then we need to give the Republicans credit for doing the same. Anyhow, I wish Schumer had kept his mouth shut.
There's still so much bitterness over the Kavanaugh hearings. It's going to resonate for some time.
On the center-right justices, I do remember great surprise when Roberts sided with the progressives on an ACA decision. I don't know much about how a judge learns to do his or her job, but expect that there are lots of factors involved besides where one falls politically.