The real reason the media is trying to deflect blame to the Democratic Party in the George Santos debacle
George Santos made up these lies. The Republican Party either helped him cover up these lies or didn’t want to know about these lies. And major media outlets were too busy chasing ratings by yelling “Red wave” and “Here comes Trump 2024” to bother looking into these lies. Enough with this nonsense where the Democratic Party takes the blame for the fact everyone else sucks.
Even if the Democrats had exposed Santos and tried to make it important, the media would have bashed the Democrats for “harping on Santos’ minor embellishments” and then given the scandal no airtime. Nothing the Democrats could have done would have produced a different outcome.
Let’s put it another way: imagine the Democratic Party calling up Citigroup or Goldman Sachs and asking for past employment information about a Republican candidate. Now imagine a major media outlet, with a respected brand name, calling up Citigroup or Goldman Sachs and asking for past employment information about a Republican candidate. Who do you think is more likely to get a straight answer?
Major media outlets have the resources and name brand recognition to get these kinds of questions answered. In fact major companies and such are generally afraid of not answering these kinds of questions when they come from major news outlets, because they don’t want to be portrayed negatively in the story.
The media routinely vets the personal lives of people it doesn’t like, in the hope of finding dirt it can write about. So why didn’t the media bother vetting the personal life of House Republican candidate George Santos? The short answer is that it couldn’t be bothered, because it had already decided that the two ratings-friendly narratives leading up to the midterms were Red Wave and Trump 2024, and nothing it might have dug up about a Republican candidate like Santos was going to further either of those two narratives.
Major media outlets are multimillion dollar for-profit corporations and are not suddenly going to start behaving ethically just because we wish they would. They’re only going to respond to pressure – and that pressure has to come from you. First, you can’t let the media cover its own tracks by baiting you into blaming the Democratic Party for the media’s own failings. From there, you have to make sure the media understands that it’s only going to keep getting your eyeballs, clicks, and ratings if it starts doing things like properly vetting Republican candidates rather than just spending the election cycle generically insisting the Republicans are going to win no matter what.
