In the past week, the media has worked overtime to defend Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren after contemporary documentary evidence proved she’s been blatantly lying about yet another biographical detail, this one pertaining to her claim of having been dismissed from her teaching job because she was “visibly pregnant.”
This is an early demonstration of the fact that liberals have successfully worked the refs, and should Warren emerge as the nominee, we should expect a media lovefest not seen since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for president.
In the aftermath of President Trump’s upset victory in 2016, stunned liberals have generated a number of excuses. One of them was that Hillary Clinton lost, because the media paid too much attention to her use of a private server as secretary of state and also to the emails from her campaign and the DNC that were hacked. In this version of the events, the focus on the emails prevented the American people from understanding what a unique threat was posed by Trump.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a flood of liberal media criticism about the dangers of “both siderism” in the age of Trump (i.e., the journalistic practice of striving for objectivity by treating each side equally). Whenever some damaging or controversial news about Trump has emerged, liberals have often taunted journalists with sarcastic cries of “but her emails!” The joke being that if only the media focused on Trump’s wrongdoing during the 2016 campaign instead of also highlighting Clinton’s improper actions, we wouldn’t have to endure four years of Trump.
Of course, this is a convenient rewrite of history. While the media did cover the Clinton email scandal, it would be absurd to argue that they did not devote a lot of coverage to the narrative that Trump was unfit to be president. They subjected him to regular negative fact checks, scrutinized his businesses and charitable endeavors, editorialized about his failure to release tax returns, reported on every offensive tweet, quoted experts warning about the threat he posed, gave wall-to-wall coverage of the Access Hollywood tape, and so forth.
It’s clear that this relentless campaign has borne fruit for liberals. The treatment of the latest Warren news makes it apparent that journalists have gotten the message. Now that she’s the front-runner, the media are going to be reluctant to pursue critical coverage of her for fear it will be seen as a way of diminishing or distracting from Trump’s misdeeds.
As I’ve written before, Warren is touted as a serious policy wonk even though her proposals do not stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Last week, she was able to roll out a “lobbying tax” proposal without the stories including any questions about the constitutionality of such an idea given the First Amendment’s restriction on laws “abridging … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
This week, the Washington Free Beacon published actual documents showing that, far from being fired for being pregnant in 1971, the local Board of Education voted to extend Warren’s contract and only accepted her resignation “with regret.” This is part of a long pattern of Warren to embellish aspects of her biography, as she did when she lied about her Native American heritage.
As Becket Adams has detailed, the media has gone out of its way to downplay the story or outright defend Warren’s obvious lies. The Washington Post has been especially lovestruck, running a half dozen news and commentary stories declaring it a “fake” scandal and a “smear.” One story absurdly tried to counter criticism of Warren by chronicling stories of women who did lose their jobs for getting pregnant. Of course, at no point did conservatives complain that women, in general, never lost their jobs for being pregnant. Instead, a conservative news outlet reported on documentary evidence that contradicts Warren’s specific claim to have been a victim of such discrimination.
From this point on, any stories critical of Warren will be mercilessly attacked by liberals as being tacitly pro-Trump. As a result, we should not expect much critical coverage of her.
