THINK OF THE PRESS NOT AS BRAVE FIREFIGHTERS, WHICH THEY’RE NOT, BUT AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, WHICH THEY ARE, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Media silence on voter registration attack deepens our divide.
In the hours and days after Gregory Timm plowed his vehicle into a tent of Republican Party volunteers registering voters in the parking lot of Kernan Village Shopping Center in Jacksonville, Florida, national coverage of the event has been alarmingly lacking.
Local news channel WJXT reported days later on the arrest report, which showed Timm telling the sheriff’s office his “disapproval of Trump” was the motivating factor for the attack. He showed the sheriff’s office a self-recorded video of him driving straight at the volunteers, expressing frustration that the video cut out before “the good part.” Even then, as I write this, the best the New York Times could muster was wire coverage.
No teams of reporters were sent to uncover his dark motivations, upbringing, or political leanings. No psychological profiles have been written up, nor have any experts weighed in on how this is a growing threat. These are all tools that would have been used by an army of reporters if Timm had been a Trump supporter plowing into Democratic Party volunteers registering voters.
The problem isn’t that Timm’s attack on the GOP wasn’t covered by most of the media. It’s that it wasn’t covered with the same voracious appetite news organizations have whenever someone who is even peripherally associated with the Right does something to a Democrat.
This isn’t whataboutism; this is realism. . . . There would have been a week’s worth of cable news coverage, several nationwide protests, and someone calling for a national conversation by now had the victims of Timm’s attack been supporting anyone but Trump.
It’s simply a fact that the journalistic class for the most part sees Republicans as deplorables whose death, silencing, or oppression is largely to be approved of, or at least not made a big deal of. This is why the deplorable class, in turn, regards the press as enemies of the people. Because they’re the people the press is inimical to.
