Doubling Down on Double Standards

Greetings bipeds,

I wrote an earlier draft of this “news”letter and showed it to my wife, a gifted editor and writer in her own right. She hated it. I trust her judgement deeply, but we had a big argument, bigger even than when I wrote a piece 20 years ago defending Budweiser. So what follows is an attempt to bring the reader along with my reasoning, working on the assumption that our disagreement rests on my failures as a writer. 

First, a point of agreement between the Fair Jessica and yours truly. The way “the media” (and the Democratic Party and its feminist shock troops) handled the Brett Kavanaugh nomination was an outrage. It was grotesque, unfair, unprofessional, fundamentally illiberal, and indefensible. 

(Note: We tend to use the term “the media” too promiscuously. Field & Stream, Commentary magazine, and ESPN are all part of the media too, and I don’t recall them doing any of the terrible things The New Yorker, the New York Times, NBC, et al, did. But it’s a useful shorthand, and you know who I mean.)

It’s difficult to analogize normal businesses to reportorial ones, but if, say, a local McDonald’s had handled meat the way The New Yorker and the New York Times handled the Kavanaugh nomination, patrons would be screaming at their lawyers in a bowel-stewed rage from the business end of their toilets, the health department would be taping off the entire property, and McDonald’s would be firing everyone involved and issuing public apologies. The relevant media organizations never did anything remotely equivalent to that, and people are justified in remaining angry about that, as well as the underlying screw-ups. 

So far so good. Now, for the sake of argument, let’s just take as a given that the Kavanaugh coverage was the lowest point in American media history. I’m not sure that’s necessarily true (The New York Times’ cover-up of Ukrainian genocide is certainly a contender—and I would argue the coverage of Hurricane Katrina was more outrageous), but I think you can make the case—I certainly would—that it was the worst ever when it comes to covering allegations of sexual assault.  

You with me so far? 

Okay. So, it is axiomatically true that whenever you’re doing comparisons over time, everything after the bottom will look better. A month or year or decade after a stock’s all time low, it will be priced higher. A football team can have a mediocre season this year, but, by definition, it will be better than its worst season ever. Every day after the worst day of your life is a better day than the worst day of your life, because if it wasn’t, that day would become the new worst day of your life. 

Now, here’s where I start wandering into clever logic-chopping—the likes of which might induce a beloved and sagacious bride to yell at her pundit husband. 

All of this means that the coverage of Tara Reade’s accusations against Joe Biden has been better than the coverage of Kavanaugh. If you think about it for two seconds, I think this has to be true. The people most furious at the media, particularly at the New York Times and CNN, are angry about this very point. With Kavanaugh, the press ran with unverified (and often unverifiable) slander and rumor, using one rumor to “corroborate” another rumor. They took it as a given that one must “believe all women,” and therefore any character assassination had to be presumed true—and printable. 

That’s not what happened this time. The Times and the Washington Post investigated Reade’s story carefully and diligently. They worked overtime to investigate the motives of the accuser and to verify the facts behind the accusation. 

I agree entirely that the reasons for their reluctance and prudence are more grounded in partisan bias than in lofty journalistic principles. Indeed, it was precisely because they wanted the Kavanaugh allegations to be true—much like the fake memo in the great Dan Rather beclowning—that they abdicated their responsibility to do their due diligence. And I have no problem being angry about this. Indeed, I share the outrage over the double standard. 

But what is the standard you want applied in cases like this? Surely, we don’t want a repetition of the Kavanaugh cock-up? If we can all agree that what the media did was wrong back then, is the complaint that they should be wrong again? Should they be living down to the crappy standard they established?

Inconsistent good is better than consistently bad.

National Review’s editorial, as one would expect, is among the best and most thoughtful critiques of the mess the Democrats and the political press have gotten themselves into. The editors write:

We do not know whether the accusations that Tara Reade has leveled against Joe Biden are true or false. That is a question of evidence and of inquiry that might be answered as time rolls on. We do know, by contrast, that the double standard that has been exhibited by Biden’s campaign and by the political press in tandem is a national disgrace. Both culturally and legally, due process must be habitually applied to nobody or to everyone. If, upon the most frivolous and protean of pretexts, it is routinely accorded to one faction while being denied to another, it is effectively lost.

I certainly agree with this in spirit and mostly in every other regard. 

But let’s assume for a moment that the attempted destruction of Kavanaugh had never occurred. What, exactly, would be the complaint against the media’s handling of the Biden case? The Washington Post and New York Times have done extensive reporting on Reade’s accusations, as have other outlets. Is the criticism that they should have done so earlier? The Post reported on Reade’s earlier charge—which did not include the more recent accusation of actual sexual assault—more than a year ago. After Reade changed the allegation on March 25, the New York Times took 19 days to report on the far more serious allegation that Biden reached under Reade’s skirt in 1993 and sexually assaulted her. Dean Baquet explained that it took that long to collect enough reporting “to present to readers for them to make their own judgment.”

Again, I agree they didn’t do this with Kavanaugh. I also agree that Baquet’s reasoning for rushing the reporting on Kavanaugh but waiting on Biden is ludicrous.  Nor do I think the Biden coverage has actually been great. 

But do you see what I am getting at? Are you outraged by the media’s ideologically motivated mishandling of the Kavanaugh case or are you outraged that they didn’t similarly mishandle the Biden case out of some misguided notion of “balance”?

This is no brief for Joe Biden—more on that in a moment. I just want to be clear on what the outrage is. Because to listen to a lot of people on Twitter and cable—and from the Trump campaign in particular—the outrage seems to be that the press wasn’t consistently irresponsible enough. 

This is the problem with our obsession with hypocrisy and media bias. Think of it this way: As a generalization, I think the left is wrong when it tries to destroy someone’s career because of something they said a long time ago. Cancel culture, for the most part, is a bad thing (though there are surely exceptions). When the right, fueled by understandable and entirely human disgust with the left’s behavior, opts to give the left a taste of its own medicine, does that make the country better off? Or does it simply make the problem bipartisan?

It’s not an easy problem to deal with. The best argument in response to this question is that the left will never learn unless it gets a taste of its own medicine. Mutually assured destruction may be an ugly concept, but it has the benefit of working quite often. 

This is NR’s point about due process being accorded to everyone or no one. But, again, there’s the rub. It seems clear to me that a society that imperfectly applies due process is preferable to one that perfectly abstains from applying it at all. I’m not in favor of unilateral conservative disarmament, I’m just pointing out that the eye-for-an-eye approach leads to a terrible place. This is a very traditional conservative insight. No society can claim to be perfect, it can only claim to be good, and goodness resides in maintaining ideals even when everyone knows we will occasionally fall short of them. 

The actual issue

Now, as Bill Clinton might have said, let’s move on to sexual assault. 

Is someone going to tell me that the Trump campaign and its de facto surrogates pushing the Biden story are actually scandalized by the allegation against Biden? The president is on tape bragging about how he grabs women by their genitals. There are numerous equally credible accusations against President Trump of equally bad behavior—and worse.

So again, what is the standard here? Is sexual assault bad? Or is it bad only when members of the other team do it? 

Reade’s accusation is now backed up by a friend who says she was informed of the sexual assault long ago. If that makes it credible—and I think it does, barring new information—what of the women who similarly confided in friends about Trump’s sexual predations? I have never subscribed to the “believe all women” sloganeering. And I am the first to concede that the people who said they did when the accusations were politically beneficial, but are now suddenly mute on Biden’s behalf look like asses. But if Reade’s accusations render Biden unfit for office, what to make of E. Jean Carroll’s or Jill Harth’s, Kristen Anderson’s or Karena Virginia’s? Or those of a dozen other women?

I have no problem with the idea of living in a country where Biden’s behavior—if reasonably established—disqualifies him for public office. But if that’s the standard, it should also be uniformly applied, right? And if applying it turns out to be impossible—Trump won’t be impeached for his predations—shouldn’t the violation of the standard at least be acknowledged? 

Of course, to take my point about NR’s due process formulation, a society that usually took such accusations seriously would be better than a society that simply didn’t care. There have always been, and always will be, people who use their wealth and connections to get away with murder—literally and figuratively. I’d still like to live in a country that upheld the ideal that no one is above the law, even if it occasionally failed to live up to that ideal. Just because O.J. Simpson got away with it doesn’t mean everyone should get to cut their spouse’s throat. When I was deep in the Clinton scandals, I would often hear, “Everyone does it.” That’s not true—but even so, not everyone is caught. It’s one thing to say that bad behavior happens. It’s another to say that we should do nothing when bad behavior is exposed.

What bothers me about the fixation with media bias and hypocrisy is that the more important standards are getting washed away. Trump World is going ballistic about the charges against Biden, not on the grounds that he sexually assaulted someone, but that the media is covering for him.

And they’re right!

But which is worse, media bias or sexual assault? 

When partisan hypocrisy becomes the gravest sin, you end up internalizing your opponents’ standards as your own. Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was once seen as a threat to social conservative support. Now, people like former anti-Trump scold Eric Metaxas say it was the reason they supported him. Disregard moral failings to own the libs!

I don’t know any conservatives who actually think we should “believe all women.” But I know lots of them who are convinced that Democrats must be forced to be consistent. 

I get why, really. But you see the problem, don’t you? It’s the reverse of the age-old problem of liberals concern-trolling conservatives. For instance: I don’t like economic protectionism, but I am constantly amused by longtime protectionists suddenly freaking out over the fact that many conservatives have adopted their positions. They’d rather point out that conservatives are hypocrites than defend their actual position, never mind take the win. Indeed, liberals are now more pro-free trade than any time in decades—not because they’ve dusted off their Adam Smith, but because Trump is against it. 

Remember the early days of the Ukraine scandal? The early argument from Trump defenders was that Trump was being accused of what Biden actually did. If you asked them whether or not what Biden did was bad, they’d say “Absolutely! It’s outrageous.” If you then asked, if it were proven that Trump did it too, would that be bad? “Of course not!”

Given what we know now, I think Biden is probably guilty. And if he is, I have no problem saying that sufficient evidence of the allegation disqualifies him from public office. I feel the exact same way about Trump. Reasonable people are free to disagree. But while the outrageous media bias and partisan hypocrisy on display is worth denouncing and exposing, they don’t change the more important standards in jeopardy; they mostly distract us from them. 

Or maybe the Fair Jessica is still right and I’m trying too hard to say something different than what everyone else is saying, even if I agree with some of it.

Photograph of Joe Biden by Scott Eisen/Getty Images.