“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination,” said the conservative black economist Thomas Sowell. That’s true. Progressives are so used to the media being biased in their favor, that they screech when the media is only 98% biased in their favor, rather than 100% biased in their favor — like when a liberal-biased newspaper doesn’t explicitly endorse their favorite candidate.
Many progressive and left-wing newspapers don’t formally endorse presidential candidates. They may constantly attack Republicans in their editorials, and their news coverage may be very slanted in favor of the Democrats, but they maintain the fiction that they are neutral and objective by not explicitly telling voters who to vote for. They hope that that way, they can influence Republican voters to support some progressive positions.
The progressive Los Angeles Times — which is left-wing and unfailingly woke — has decided to adopt this approach this year, not issuing a formal endorsement in the presidential race, even as it pushes one woke, left-wing policy after another. This has led to an outraged reaction from progressives, who demand that the progressive paper explicitly endorse Harris, and falsely imply that the Times is avoiding criticism of Donald Trump out of cowardice. The Times criticizes Trump all the time, just as it criticized George Bush all the time, and regularly criticized Ronald Reagan. It has had an obvious preference for the Democrats for more than 40 years, turning a blind eye to corruption scandals in Los Angeles that involved misdeeds by local Democratic officials, while wailing about wise Republican policies that later turned out to make sense, such as missile-defense systems that turned out to be wildly successful and served as the model for a missile shield system that saved countless lives in Israel. The Los Angeles Times has defended left-wing policies that are unpopular even in strongly Democratic California, such as racial preferences, which the Los Angeles Times supports, but California voters voted to ban. It is to the left of even many Democratic voters.
The Times is not avoiding criticizing Trump at all, much less to curry favor with Trump. The Times has attacked one Republican president after another, and has run op-eds depicting all of them as fascists.
Indeed, the Los Angeles Times attacks Republicans every day in its editorial page, and runs multiple editorials attacking Republicans every week. In a recent week, the only thing positive about Republicans that appeared in the Los Angeles Times was a letter to the editor suggesting that various states fared better under Republican rule than under Democratic rule (the letter cited a study by a non-partisan think-tank finding that states economically fare better under Republican rule than under Democratic rule. That study also found that Republican states have better educational policies than Democratic states do). Almost every other item in the op-ed page that week peddled Democratic talking points or criticized Republicans.
Everybody knows that the Los Angeles Times has a left-wing bias. For it to formally endorse Kamala Harris would do her no good, because everyone with a brain would just say, “Of course the Los Angeles Times endorsed Kamala Harris, she’s a Democrat, and it is a Democratic newspaper biased in favor of Democrats.”
The fact that progressives complain about this decision is a sign of how progressive the media environment is. Progressives can’t find any real sign of media bias against progressives in the mainstream media, so they have to make one up, by claiming that a progressive newspaper is biased in favor of Trump, if it doesn’t explicitly endorse his opponent, even if attacks Trump weekly or daily in its editorials.
Progressives are also complaining that the Washington Post, which is strongly Democratic leaning, won’t issue an endorsement in this year’s presidential race (see, for example, this social media post, by Radley Balko, a leftist writer who was once a libertarian before he drifted leftward, but now supports things like racial preferences, welfare, and cancel culture, which no actual libertarian would support). But a Washington Post endorsement won’t convince hardly anyone, because everyone already knows the Post is a liberal paper — it hasn’t endorsed a Republican for president since 1952 — so a Republican isn’t going to vote for Harris just because The Post tells them to.
