The third dreadful assassination attempt against President Donald Trump was an opportunity to assess where we stand on the question of political violence. In this decade, the media has demonstrated a profound double standard.

The horrible riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a four-year obsession for the liberal media, and supposedly smart people compared it to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 — as in Jan. 6 was “worse than” the other disasters. But the George Floyd riots in 2020 were presented dishonestly as peaceful protests. We all remember reporters standing in front of fires saying it was “peaceful,” or “not unruly.” The tens of people who died were barely mentioned.

When Trump was shot in the ear in 2024, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan complained that Trump didn’t urge his supporters to calm down their commentary: “This was a traumatic event, no doubt for him, but I did notice there was no call for lowering the temperature, condemning all political violence.” Even worse, the network newscasts remained highly negative for Trump in the first few days after he was shot.

Political violence is a great example of how the news media — one seeking to reflect the “mainstream” — could display what could be called a nonpartisan bias, choosing to stand for civic goals regardless of party. Rioting — from anyone — could draw negative coverage. Property destruction — by anyone — is a negative. Because these practices can cause a cycle of vengeance. You burn down my house, I burn down yours. It’s not “mostly peaceful” to you when it’s your house.

Empathy is entirely missing. The New York Times is championing “micro-looting,” as NPR promoted a book called “In Defense of Looting.” They don’t seem to consider how they would like it if you looted their buildings.

A nonpartisan bias would be great in this moment, if journalists decided to oppose gerrymandering, regardless of which party is doing it (or both). Instead, we witnessed a pile of outraged stories over Trump pushing redistricting in Texas, and then fairly positive coverage of Gov. Gavin Newsom pushing for more redistricting in already-gerrymandered California. In recent weeks, we’ve had near radio silence as they drew a ridiculously gerrymandered map and put it on the ballot in Virginia. One could conclude that all this gerrymandering will cancel out. But you could still discourage the practice.

A nonpartisan bias could be employed in “fact-checking,” where it could be discouraged when you compare our elected president to a genocidal maniac like Adolf Hitler. If it’s wrong for Trump to call Kamala Harris a “communist,” then it should be wrong to call Trump a “fascist.” But that’s not the world we live in now.

We know why this notion is the furthest thing from today’s media hive mind. They’re constantly getting a torrent of outrage from all their Democrat and leftist friends — the only people whose opinion they really value — that any notion of nonpartisanship is viciously attacked as a “permission structure for fascism.” Bari Weiss making the slightest noise about aiming news at the “center” at CBS is seen as lying prostrate in front of Trump.

The Left clearly needs the tone of the news to be frantically negative all the time, to feed their highly agitated base — and hopefully motivated to vote against Trump.

But this tone is exactly why half the country thinks the national news is fake.

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