Liberal Media Would Have You Think Trump’s Prosecutors Are Nonpartisans. They Aren’t.

Tim Graham / August 17, 2023

Here we go again. The Democrats have unfurled a fourth indictment of former President Donald Trump, this time in Fulton County, Georgia. The No. 1 media bias complaint on this trend—other than how these indictments “flood the zone” and devolve the Republican presidential primary into a hyperbolic courtroom drama—is that reporters typically fail to identify the prosecutors as Democrats.

The big Associated Press dispatch on this indictment, by reporters Kate Brumback and Eric Tucker, doesn’t identify District Attorney Fani Willis as a Democrat. They just quote her overzealous copy about how “the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result.”

In the penultimate paragraph, the AP duo noted Trump “is campaigning and fundraising around these themes, portraying himself as the victim of Democratic prosecutors out to get him.” But that’s general and not specific.

What’s specific is NBC’s “Today” show putting the words “Criminal Enterprise” right next to Trump’s face in the show’s introduction. “Criminal enterprise! The former president and top aides charged over election interference in Georgia,” touted co-host Hoda Kotb.

NBC wouldn’t provide any context about the prosecutor’s political motivations. Reporter Blayne Alexander only quoted Trump calling the charges a “witch hunt.”

This has happened over and over again. New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg isn’t described in media accounts as an elected Democrat who ran on getting Trump. New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump over business fraud, isn’t described as an elected Democrat who ran on getting Trump. They don’t talk about Jack Smith’s wife, Katy Chevigny, the filmmaker who produced a Netflix gushfest for Michelle Obama.

In this newest case, Willis ran for district attorney in 2020, and almost immediately began an investigation of Trump. All these Democrat politicians are drawing adulation from Democrats—at the same time as reporters present them as nonpartisans.

There’s not just an elected Democrat prosecutor in Willis, but a grand jury selected in Fulton County, Georgia, which voted for Joe Biden over Trump by a margin of 73% to 26%. This is similar to jury pools in Washington, D.C. (Biden won 92% to 5%), or Bragg’s territory of New York County (Biden drew roughly 603,000 to Trump’s 85,000).

In every case, the jury is going to be chock-full of Biden-voting Democrats. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie vaguely mentioned Fulton being a “blue county.” Smith used a D.C. grand jury before indicting Trump in Florida. Now, Democrats will worry about a second grand jury in Florida—it might not be as “reliable.”

Many a Trump-voting Republican can believe that after all the media bias and suppression, Biden won Georgia in 2020 in a squeaker, and still believe that a prosecutor comparing Trump to an organized-crime boss looks like a mudslinging Democrat.

The pro-Biden media have constructed a rhetorical device where Trump faces a “myriad of legal problems,” like this can’t be described as a pack of Democratic prosecutors building their own careers by taking down Big Orange.

This is vastly different than the media’s rough treatment of Kenneth Starr in the late 1990s. Just in 1998, NBC reporter Gwen Ifill compared the Starr report to a truck bomb placed on the Capitol steps. Then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said Starr reminded him of Nazi capo Heinrich Himmler. CNN’s Bruce Morton compared Starr’s probe to George Orwell’s “1984,” and CBS morning host Charles Osgood wrote a poem comparing Starr to “the unshaved ghost of Joe McCarthy.”

So, you can easily know which side the “objective media” is on when you see which prosecutors are painted as objective and which ones are compared to Nazi war criminals and terrorists.

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