A month ago, Professor Turley, who has been gradually losing patience with the totalitarian tactics of progressives and the media, noted that the term “conspiracy theory” was almost exclusively reserved in the media for Trump and his supporters. Yet Joe Biden had repeatedly said that he was certain Trump plans to delay the election this fall. Although this assertion, Turley wrote, “is utterly without factual or constitutional support,” Biden’s fear-mongering, linked to Big Lie #3: “Trump Is A Fascist/Hitler/Dictator/Monster,” was accorded the status of “a prediction” in a Politico article. “It has been peddled by various Democratic figures and commentators for months and is all the rage on the internet, even though it should be sold as a set that includes a tin foil hat and an electromagnetic ghost detector,” wrote the professor.

“Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, and come up with some rationale why it cannot be held,” said Biden. To fair, rational, objective people who have not been disabled by the Trump Hate Virus, this is despicable, and no more acceptable from a political leader than the worst of the President’s tweets, like the one suggesting that Joe Scarborough might have murdered an intern. Compare the news media treatment of Trump’s conspiracy theories and Biden’s.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias.

This week, Biden was at it again, telling one of the repetitious comics who devote 90% of their routines to attacking the President of the United States, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show (Way to go for a challenging interview, Joe!) that he believes President Trump will try to steal the election in November and that he is “absolutely convinced” the military will escort Mr. Trump out of the White House if he loses the election and doesn’t leave.

This is literally the Big Lie in action, and an especially hypocritical one, since the only people who have tried to deny the results of a Presidential election within memory are Biden’s party and its supporters. Trump, foolishly, played the Big Lie game and denied that he would refuse to accept a defeat in November, which is exactly what a Big Lie is designed to do: make the target of the lie deny it.

A fair and competent news media would condemn tactics like this, which are especially ironic coming from a man who has pledged to return “honor and decency” to the White House. Campaign rhetoric can’t go any lower. Never mind: this episode, like so many others, lays out clearly what the new rules are, and will be once the campaign really gets underway. What ever Joe says is fine; whatever the President says is horrible. Got it…and I think most Americans get that these are the rules too. I also think such obviously biased and unethical journalism has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Althouse had a perceptive observation about this two days ago:

If you’re criticized for anything you do, you can see it as liberating. That’s Trump style, empowered by the unrelenting hate. There are so many Trump haters in the media, and they will take whatever raw material he gives them any given day and whip it up into a steaming pile of ORANGE MAN BAD, so he doesn’t have to worry about trying to give them raw material that might result in a tastier daily special. It’s never going to happen. The man is free…

The President would benefit from a news media whose criticism was credible, because he could use it to assess his own performance realistically. With a biased news media, he doesn’t have this resource; he’s free, but his performance suffers by not having any trustworthy critical analysis in the media. Obama’s performance as President was handicapped by the opposite phenomenon. He was free too, because he knew that the news media would never criticize him harshly no matter what he did. It also made him the lazy, arrogant leader with a flat learning curve that he became.

Both situations are examples of why competent, trustworthy journalism is essential to a functioning, successful democracy, and the lack of that is a primary reason we currently don’t have one.