Those who are active on political Twitter have become accustomed to seeing the phrase “But her emails!” pop up on their screens for nearly four years. The phrase is used when President Trump behaves badly, saying or doing something that’s unseemly or indefensible to anybody but blind partisans.
The deployment of the phrase can be traced back to a gripe that liberals had about media coverage of the 2016 election. While conservatives saw nothing but media attacks on Trump, to liberals, the media were too harsh on Hillary Clinton — especially, in their minds, when it came to the amount of attention paid to the controversy surrounding Clinton’s use of her private email server as secretary of state and her mass email deletions. To these Democratic partisans, the email controversy was small potatoes, and the time spent drawing news consumers to it created the impression that Trump and Clinton were equally bad. These critics view Trump as a much more serious, indeed historic, threat to American democracy. Whereas providing critical coverage to all presidential candidates was once viewed as the goal of journalism, in the age of Trump, that philosophy has been referred to derisively as “both siderism,” a complaint of false equivalence.
Appending “But her emails!” to stories about Trump’s misdeeds became a way of taunting journalists, making them feel guilty and culpable for imposing Trump on the world. However, the taunts also had a longer-term objective. The hope was to work the refs so that in the future, reporters wouldn’t repeat the “mistake” of seriously scrutinizing any Democratic challenger to Trump.
In 2020, the strategy has hit pay dirt. Joe Biden managed to use the coronavirus as an excuse to spend the better part of six months campaigning from his basement and only submitting to interviews that he knew would be easy. Now that he’s emerged to hold some press conferences, reporters are just offering up one softball after another. Additionally, the media have worked overtime to douse potentially damaging stories against Biden.
To be sure, Biden did receive scrutiny during the Democratic nomination fight for seemingly having lost a step and for being a bit too touchy-feely around young women. And the media cheered on onetime opponent Kamala Harris for mauling him in a debate for his record on school busing. But the statute of limitations on negative Biden coverage expired in March, as soon as it was clear he would be the Democratic nominee and thus the only person standing in the way of a second Trump term.
Shortly after Biden had effectively secured the nomination, his former staffer Tara Reade reemerged with a more detailed allegation that while she was working in his Senate office in the 1990s, Biden pinned her against the wall and penetrated her with his fingers. After having spent the fall of 2018 pushing the “believe all women” standard during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the media spent weeks digging up dirt on Reade, helping not only to discredit her but to intimidate any other potential accusers from coming forward.
While there were and are certainly reasons to question Reade’s account, the story was in many ways more credible than that of Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s main accuser. While it was confirmed that Reade did work for Biden, there is no evidence that Ford and Kavanaugh ever even met. While there is evidence that Reade spoke to multiple people within a few months or years of her accusation about Biden, it took nearly 30 years for Ford to tell anybody any version of her story.
Yet while Ford was treated as a saint by the media and her story was accepted as completely true, journalists went into attack mode with Reade. Politico had a reporter speak to people who had crossed paths with Reade, including a former landlord, and ran a hit piece with the headline “‘Manipulative, deceitful, user’: Tara Reade left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances.”
To give too much credence to an accusation against Biden would be to repeat the grave error of 2016. That is, subjecting Biden to the Kavanaugh standard when it comes to accusations of sexual misconduct would risk a false equivalence between Biden’s behavior and the multiple sexual assault accusations against Trump (as well as his own boast of “grabbing” women by the you-know-what).
So fearful are journalists of being tagged as enablers that they’ve been willing to embarrass themselves whenever they get a chance to speak with Biden. My colleague Becket Adams has been regularly chronicling some of the absurd questions, if you can call them that, being teed up for Biden during one-on-one interviews and press conferences.
In March, NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Biden about Trump’s handling of the coronavirus: “Do you think there’s already — do you think there is blood on the president’s hands considering the slow response? Or is that too harsh of a criticism?” Within the same week, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin also asked Biden if Trump was responsible for deaths. She also offered Biden this doozy: “Your strength, really, your strength is in traveling around the country and connecting with people, right? Connecting with voters, looking them in the eye, a hug, a handshake, especially in these crucial months before the election, and you can’t do any of that right now. Mr. Vice President, does that worry you?”
This set the stage for months of easy interviews that followed. Biden largely eschewed press conferences as a candidate but, in September, finally succumbed. And the media were there to help him get through the experience without a scratch.
Atlantic writer Edward-Isaac Dovere, who highlighted some of Reade’s past writings praising Vladimir Putin after her allegation against Biden first surfaced, used the opportunity of a press conference to promote a report in his publication claiming that Trump referred to fallen U.S. Marines as “losers” and “suckers.” Dovere then asked Biden, “When you hear these remarks — ‘suckers,’ ‘losers,’ recoiling from amputees — what does it tell you about President Trump’s soul and the life he leads?”
CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe offered more of an attack on Trump than a question. He noted that Trump “once again suggested to his supporters that they should consider voting twice if they are in one of those states that can allow you to request an absentee ballot. Say, ‘Fill that out,’ and then go try voting again in person. State officials have said it’s a felony, in some cases. Just curious what you make of it.”
This is the sort of questioning we should expect from the press in the closing weeks of the election.
Liberals have spent the past four years heckling journalists, and making sure that they’d think twice about negative coverage of the eventual Democratic nominee. Journalists would rather be accused of liberal bias by conservative commentators than be subjected to the wrath of liberal elites who are closer to their social circles and whose approval they seek. A lashing from a like-minded journalism school professor burns more than a flood of angry tweets from the Right.
Now, in 2020, political journalists know that they have to be looking over their shoulders whenever they think about running a negative story about Biden or asking him a challenging question. Because if they do properly scrutinize him, they will be subjected to the worst insult imaginable. They will be accused of being complicit in reelecting Trump.
Philip Klein is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
