If there's one thing the sexual assault allegation that has been made against former Vice President and now-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has shown us, is the double standard in the coverage of said allegation by members of the media when compared to allegations made against conservatives.
One glaring example has been made clear by New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg. In her piece about the allegation made by former Senate staffer Tara Reade, Goldberg said her claims are "being used to troll the #MeToo movement."
Goldberg writes:
"It would be easier to know what to do with Tara Reade’s accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her if her tale were more solid, or if it were less.
...
"Reade seems almost engineered in a lab to inspire skepticism in mainstream Democrats, both because her story keeps changing and because of her bizarre public worship of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. 'President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness,' she wrote in a since-deleted 2018 Medium post. "His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity.” (Reade has since said her comments about Russia stemmed from a novel she was writing, though the Medium article is written as an op-ed essay.) In December she tweeted, with worrying grandiosity, 'I worked for the Senate, I know the plan to bring Russia to its knees.'"
While admitting Reade could be telling the truth, Goldberg ends her piece with, "Personally, I’m just left with doubt: doubt about Biden and doubt about the charges against him. But the one thing I have little doubt about is the bad faith of those using this strange, sad story to hector feminists into pretending to a certainty they have no reason to feel."
Goldberg's story leaves plenty of room for skepticism for the Reade allegation since there has been no hard or physical evidence of the alleged assault. But, that's not how she wrote her column about then-Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh and the ever-increasing thin allegations that were made against him during the nomination process.
The column, titled "Pigs All the Way Down," written after Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, published the weak claims made by Deborah Ramirez, but that's not how Goldberg saw it:
"This seems damning, but the story leaves reason for doubt. Farrow and Mayer write that there are gaps in Ramirez’s memory, and she was initially reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role 'with certainty.' No eyewitness confirms that Kavanaugh was at the party, though other students recall hearing about it.
Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, however, this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be."
"Watching all this unfold is radicalizing for reasons far beyond Republican mistreatment of Kavanaugh’s accusers. His story shows, in lurid microcosm, how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. Women who struggle ceaselessly to be smart enough, attractive enough, ambitious enough and likable enough have been playing a rigged game," Goldberg concluded. "As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does."
Over course, the media's double standard with the Biden allegation goes beyond one NYT columnist. Fox News reported CNN, MSNBC, and the three broadcast networks did not offer any on-air coverage or articles on their websites about the alleged assault for three weeks after it was made.