The political-insider website Axios published a story Wednesday headlined "Joe Biden is the luckiest, least scrutinized frontrunner." Mike Allen and Hans Nichols declared: "Eight months ago, Joe Biden was in danger of losing the Democratic nomination. Now he's a prohibitive favorite for president -- who got there with lots of luck and shockingly little scrutiny."
Or, to put it another way, Biden is blessed with loads of "luck" due to a press corps that has energetically avoided all its own sloganeering about holding public officials accountable.
Axios didn't note that President Donald Trump submitted to a rough interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios that liberal outlets everywhere exploited, while Biden has not been submitted to one.
President Trump submitted to a rough interview with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" that liberal outlets everywhere exploited. Biden's gone nowhere near Wallace.
President Trump was lambasted as a moron for granting a pile of interviews to Washington Post "legend" Bob Woodward, which liberal outlets everywhere exploited. Biden was not.
The media are laser-focused on one objective: sending Trump back to private life. As Axios admitted, "The media's obsession with Trump -- and Trump's compulsion to dominate the news -- allowed Biden to purposely and persistently minimize public appearances and tough questions."
There's a word for a presidential aspirant who persistently minimizes tough questions: coward.
Our preposterously partisan press corps demonstrated its lack of professionalism all over again when the New York Post published a story on Oct. 14. It included an alleged email to Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the Burisma board, on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the board at a reported monthly salary of up to $50,000.
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He wrote: "Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together. It's realty (sic) an honor and pleasure."
In eight interviews, Joe Biden has drawn a bold red line saying that he and his son have never discussed the lobbying gigs. He said on MSNBC, "I never discussed with my son anything having to do with what was going on in Ukraine." He even exclaimed, "There has been no indication of conflict of interest in Ukraine or anywhere else, period."
So, did Biden meet with the Burisma exec? Journalists don't want to know. They want to accept the incredibly lame defense that such a meeting wasn't on Biden's "official schedule." That's simply denial, and they know it.
ABC, CBS and NBC all skipped the story on the evening newscasts. The next morning, NBC's Hallie Jackson went all in on Biden spin. "Now, the story is so dubious," she touted. "And we should note, by the way, that the Biden campaign says that meeting was never on Biden's official schedule. But Facebook and Twitter made moves to try to limit the spread of this story. And The Washington Post is reporting that some intelligence experts think this has the hallmark of, like a disinformation campaign, meant to interfere with the election."
So, Facebook and Twitter tried to censor the New York Post -- an outrageously politicized prank -- and the NBC "reporter" used that to say the story is "so dubious." Jackson dismissed the source as "a tabloid" -- as if it were the National Enquirer. She couldn't even specify and say it was a "New York tabloid."
This is a reporter whom NBC colleague Katy Tur congratulated in her book as one of the campaign "Road Warriors." Oh, she sounds like a warrior, all right -- for Biden-Harris 2020.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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