Here’s another one for your “what if the ideology were reversed” file.

Two seemingly separate items on today’s Providence Journal opinion page have a telling connection if your morning news stream looks like mine.  The first is the top-of-page political cartoon by Dave Granlund.  It shows some vultures saying, “We’re the other responders,” and holding a newspaper with headlines of people taking advantage of the victims and the destruction.

The second is a letter from Michael Hayes of East Greenwich who wants to know why, if events in Charlottesville merited four days of spontaneous front page coverage on the Providence Journal, a wave of even-more-deadly police shootings didn’t deserve the same treatment:

I wonder if anyone remembers the Black Lives Matter marches and the chants of “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now.” I guess those words were not “disgraceful” and “shameful.”

Where were the headlines “WAR ON POLICE CONTINUES” or those telling us that our Rhode Island leaders were “sickened” over the killing of police officers?

The story that connects these two items comes courtesy of left-wing activist Linda Sarsour, who has had a high profile with “The Resistance,” offering the news media an opportunity for photos of a hijab-wearing radical.  Sarsour’s response to Hurricane Harvey’s devastation was to promote a left-wing community organizing PAC under the title of “Hurricane Relief Fund.”  Called on the scheme, Sarsour could only draw the fine distinction that it wasn’t her PAC and accuse people of being white supremacists.

So, what do you think?  If some prominent right winger were out there telling people that a donation to a conservative PAC in Texas was “hurricane relief,” would that be transformed into a national story?

Even if you wouldn’t go that far, the letter to the editor and the Sarsour story provide a reminder that we can’t rely on mainstream news outlets to keep us informed about what’s going on in the world would have a distorted view.

Last week, Providence Journal Executive Editor Alan Rosenberg penned a column on “how [the paper] decided on big front-page treatments of stories related to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, four days in a row, starting last Sunday.”  Unfortunately, he never quite gets to the interesting part, which is why a particular story is bigger news than another.

Why, for example, was it “of course” the right move to put promoting an “anti-white-supremacy vigil at the Rhode Island State House” on the front page Monday?  I’m not suggesting it wasn’t, but what made it so?  Is that what Providence Journal readers want to know about, especially?  Was the hope to tap into interest in a national story with a local angle?

By Wednesday, such questions have a little sharper edge.  Why was President Trump’s “both sides” comment so newsworthy as to bring the front-page coverage count to four days?  These aren’t idle questions, because as we saw, coverage like that provided by the Projo contributed to a massive mob descending on Boston to intimidate a small group of local free-speech advocates.  Where do the objective news decisions end and the contribution to a partisan left-wing narrative begin?

Ed Driscoll recently raised a telling reminder on Instapundit:

Note that this syndicated column by Ruben Navarrette, Jr. is running in the San Francisco Chronicle,which buried its editors’ videotaped interview with Obama in January of 2008 in which he vowed to bankrupt the coal industry, instead of putting his words in giant 72 point type on its front page the next day. A serious presidential candidate vowing to wipe a major industry should be major news no matter what your political leanings or your views on environmentalism. Its omission by the Chronicle served as a stark reminder that long ago, old media morphed into Democratic operatives with bylines, who merely produce content as a side function of their main goal of keeping their team in power and accumulating more of it.

It sure feels that way, and if Driscoll’s impression is incorrect, the Rosenbergs of the news industry are going to have to be a little more detailed in their explanations of why.

Rod Dreher got to this point before I was able to do so:

The news media have been seriously distorting public reaction to Trump’s handling of Charlottesville. Whether this is a matter of only seeing what they want to see, or a matter of the talking heads being concentrated among coastal elites of both parties, is a matter of conjecture. True, a slight majority of Americans think Trump didn’t go far enough, but judging from the coverage and commentary, you would have thought at Charlottesville, Trump met his Waterloo. It didn’t happen. Charlottesville is not nearly as big a deal to Americans as it is to the media and coastal elites.

From coverage in the national media (and across the board, here in the Northeast), one would expect the “not far enough” opinion to rate in the 90s.  The only quibble I’d make is that Dreher skipped one possibility:  Maybe it’s not only that journalists are seeing what they want to see within their coastal elite bubble, but that they actively want to shape the narrative.

Whatever the case, one might fairly suggest that, when it comes to anything having to do with President Trump, journalists aren’t doing their job.  That’s true even if they see their “job” in some respects to be advancing their ideology.  Consider this, from Dreher:

This is likely to cause them to seriously overreach. If Democrats and liberals only pay attention to the media and to each other on the statue debate, they are going to alienate a lot of people. The hostile media environment has made it very difficult for anybody to speak up for keeping the statues, even though that is a majority opinion in America. So people will keep that opinion to themselves.

Keeping their opinions to themselves doesn’t mean forgetting the issue altogether.  Even people who don’t particularly care about Confederate statues will observe the way things work, these days, and may conclude that the country very much needs forces pushing back against the elite zeitgeist.  President Trump is currently the most visible manifestation of that conclusion, and I fear there are worse.

So… Boston.  A small group organized what turned out to be an actual rally for free speech, and left-wing “counter protesters” — likely ranging from Antifa to well-meaning college kids and others — turned out ready to brawl with Nazis.  In fairness, the news media promoted it as if it was the same sort of white supremacist rally as in Charlottesville, because that sold stories and helped them advance the narrative that racists are resurgent in America.

When it turned out there were no white supremacists to attack, the “counter-protesters” dragged an elderly woman by her American flag, screamed threats at a young man with a MAGA hat and an Israeli flag, and threw bottles of urine at police officers.

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds offers a related reminder:

Note that although the Tea Party movement was treated much worse by mainstream media than Antifa has been, Tea Partiers never physically attacked journalists, or anyone. Note also that this didn’t get the Tea Party any credit, or even spare it from being compared to Nazis and the Klan.

Shame on the journalists and politicians creating the false sense of boogeymen.  On the other hand, thank you for doubling down on your ideological winnings from last week and losing it all, bringing us back to status quo ante: left-wing violence and opposition to free speech.

From what I’m reading, more “counter protesters” were arrested than actual free-speech advocates attended.  Guess that means there really aren’t two sides to the political violence.  The whole thing was a good lesson, though, of what the Left, mainstream media, and national Democrats hope to accomplish by tarring the entire Right as racist and minimizing the violence of the Left.

Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice details the latest findings in his organization’s investigation of the government’s cover-up of the meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch at a time when Lynch was investigating Clinton’s wife, who (you may recall) was running for president and was heavily favored by the Left, including the news media.

Sekulow points out that it wasn’t just a government cover-up:

… there is clear evidence that the main stream media was colluding with the DOJ to bury the story. A Washington Post reporter, speaking of the Clinton Lynch meeting story, said, “I’m hoping I can put it to rest .” The same Washington Post reporter, interacting with the DOJ spin team, implemented specific DOJ requests to change his story to make the Attorney General appear in a more favorable light. A New York Times reporter apologetically told the Obama DOJ that he was being “pressed into service” to have to cover the story. As the story was breaking, DOJ press officials stated, “I also talked to the ABC producer, who noted that they aren’t interested, even if Fox runs with it.”

Americans cannot trust the national media to cover the federal government or national politics.  They’re on a side.  Period.

I can’t help but recall wistfully a time when President George W. Bush generated mild controversy by visibly carrying a copy of Bernard Goldberg’s book, Bias.  The rapid contrast of the Obama Era sandwiched between the Bush and Trump administrations answered that debate definitively.