A media dedicated to saving Democrats

There is no easier job in Washington than serving as a press secretary for a Democratic politician.

That’s because the liberal press just does your job for you.

Consider, for example, this work of art from the Associated Press: “The Republican leading the probe of Hunter Biden has his own shell company and complicated friends.”

For the record, Hunter Biden stands accused of overseeing a massive, multi-million-dollar influence-peddling operation throughout his father’s political career, trading on the family name to strike potentially illegal business deals with Chinese and other foreign nationals. During the 2020 campaign, President Biden stated unequivocally that he had “never discussed” and “never talked” to his son about his business interests, which was later shown to be untrue.

The president also claimed that his son “has not made money” dealing with China, which is also false. Hunter took in about $7 million from foreign sources, beginning at around the time of his father’s vice presidency. Hunter and his business associates formed at least 15 companies (many of which are now defunct) during his father’s vice presidency. Nearly 20 Biden-linked LLCs were used to move the cash around. Moreover, then Vice President Biden himself apparently used pseudonyms to exchange emails with his son regarding said influence-peddling scheme.

In contrast, there’s House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), the Republican targeted by the AP, who co-owns six acres of land with a campaign contributor as part of an LLC worth between $500,000 and $1 million. This for-profit venture reported no dividends in 2022, according to the Republican lawmaker’s 2022 financial disclosures.

For a journalist sufficiently motivated to make Hunter Biden’s behavior seem normal, this is basically the same thing as a multimillion-dollar influence-operation involving Ukrainian business interests, Chinese nationals and the White House. You know — “tomato, tomahto,” right?

Another example of this absurd public relations-style of journalism comes from Politico Magazine, which published an interview seemingly designed to rehabilitate failed Virginia Democratic candidate Susanna Gibson. Gibson became famous when her penchant for performing sex acts on a public website for online public audiences derailed her bid for the Virginia House of Delegates.

“My entire life was rocked on Sept. 11,” Gibson said. She was referring, of course, to Sept. 11, 2023, the day her online performances made the news, but she lacked the self-awareness to recognize just how hilarious that sentence is in the context of U.S. history. “They had found these videos on the dark web and shopped them around to various news outlets. I didn’t have any idea that there were ever videos of me that had been made and uploaded to multiple sites.”

For the record, Gibson had an account on a legal webcam site, where she and her husband performed sex acts for online audiences. In between performances, they solicited donations (“tokens” and “tips”) from viewers and took requests.

When not creating pornography, Gibson is a nurse practitioner, her husband an attorney. Both are sentient human beings in the 21st century, which means they know that anything you put online will be there forever. Yet in Gibson’s telling, she is the victim, in no way responsible for her own webcam sex shows that she livestreamed. In fact, she now talks about suing the person “who found and then disseminated illegal pornographic images of me — again, violating federal and state laws — they need to be held accountable….”

“I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy,” she said. “Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.”

More amazing than Gibson’s total lack of introspection and sense of personal responsibility is Politico’s complete failure to push back on her delusional claims. The interviewer did nothing to correct the record or challenge her allegation that her privacy was somehow violated because people noticed the public sex shows she had performed online. Rather, the piece fully indulged Gibson’s delusions, as well as the grievances of defeated Virginia Democrats.

But this is nothing new, either — this is essentially the Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) rehab tour, 2.0. Which raises an important question: We know what the media do when Republicans are caught in a scandal. They hold them accountable. But is there anything our media will not do to burnish and touch up the images of Democrats caught in gross, seedy, shady and even obviously corrupt behavior?

Finally — and it’s a smaller thing, but still — please compare the following CNN headlines, both of which concern people defying House subpoenas. See if you can detect a slight difference in tone.

First: “’I have made mistakes in my life’: Hunter Biden speaks on Capitol Hill.”

Second: “Steve Bannon defied a congressional subpoena. Find out his punishment.”

The worst thing about so much of today’s news reporting isn’t that it’s one-sided — it’s that it is so one-sided as to be boring. If you know which party is in trouble, you can reliably predict exactly what the resulting news story will tell you, and what it won’t tell you.

For the sake of Democratic press secretaries everywhere, who are surely bored to death not having to do anything, can we please get some different perspectives in news?

If not for the press secretaries’ sake, at least do it for variety.

Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.