The reporters this time are Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. Again in February, it was fellow New York Occasions reporter Maggie Haberman, who waited for her guide to disclose that White Home residence workers would discover bogs clogged with paper and believed that Trump was attempting to flush paperwork. In Nov. 2021, ABC Information reporter Jonathan Karl got here out with a guide revealing that, within the run-up to the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, then-White Home chief of workers Mark Meadows had despatched Mike Pence’s high aide a memo outlining a plan to overturn the election. In September 2020, Bob Woodward launched a guide revealing that in February and March of that 12 months, Trump had repeatedly instructed him how harmful the coronavirus was, in full contradiction to his public message or his administration’s actions, and admitted that he “wished to at all times play it down.”
I’m virtually definitely lacking some.
Time after time, reporters get data that’s genuinely vital for most people to find out about, vital for the way forward for the democracy, and … they sit on it for months, the higher to gather an enormous advance and rack up gross sales. Prior to now, these after-the-fact revelations had been extra more likely to be gossip, particulars about inner blow-ups, and backstabbing. Due to Trump and the more and more extremist, anti-democratic Republican Occasion, nowadays, the revelations are actually details about an tried coup. That’s not one thing you save for the guide, except your sole considerations are cash and a glitzy guide roll-out with numerous high-profile protection. Which, to be actual about it, is how all the New York Occasions politics desk operates nowadays, to a level that exhibits it’s coming from the highest.
So, yeah, it’s horrible {that a} Senate chief heard about plans to overturn an election that he knew to have been authorized and honest and stored his mouth shut as a result of he was frightened about shedding the subsequent election. But it surely’s not the primary time McConnell has performed one thing like that, as when he blocked the Obama administration from blowing the whistle on Russian election interference in 2016. Mitch McConnell has one concern on the earth, and that’s Republican energy. He’ll at all times act to get extra of it.
However individuals like McConnell get the power to behave that manner when nobody holds them to account. When, as an illustration, the media doesn’t maintain them to account. When the media reviews brazen lies from one get together as holding the identical weight as largely truthful assertion from the opposite get together. And when the media merely doesn’t report what’s occurring till months after the actual fact as a result of it advantages the careers of particular person reporters to carry again data.
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