The Liberal Media Isn't

 A good article here. Long but worth reading. a snip below.

The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism

We’re in the middle of a nationwide wave of GOP legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory,” a vaguely defined category that includes everything from teaching the concept of “white privilege” to holding diversity seminars to telling children that slavery was bad. Republican legislatures are micromanaging curricula and getting teachers fired and — pulling my hair out as I type this — actually banning books.

And that’s just the K-12 authoritarianism. In 2017, Donald Trump explicitly threatened to pull federal funds from U.C. Berkeley after students protested a right-wing speaker. In 2020, he signed an executive order banning publicly funded universities from holding diversity trainings that included any mention of "systemic racism," "intersectionality," or "racial humility" (???). In 2019, Trump’s education department ordered Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill to “remake” their Middle East studies program to include more positive depictions of Christianity and Judaism.

I could go on. There’s the Republican congressional candidate who body-slammed a reporter, the Republican House Rep who jokes about executing Democrats, the Republican attorney general who prosecuted an activist for laughing during his confirmation hearing. Conservatives have developed an entire ecosystem of websites and grassroots organizations dedicated to targeting left-wing professors for harassment.

Nothing remotely analogous exists on the institutional left. Democrats control the house, senate and governorship in 15 states. They have made no effort to ban conservative books or “cancel” racist professors or outlaw microaggressions. The reason right-wing media constantly highlights obscure documents and non-mandatory corporate trainings is that they cannot find legitimate examples of Democrats using their power to install illiberalism.

Articles about the “illiberal left” feel like dispatches from the Upside Down, a parallel universe where American political life looks nothing like it does in reality. Why are readers of national publications constantly being told that they should worry about the left potentially, sometime in the future, becoming as bad as Republicans are now?

America is in the middle of a worrying democratic backslide. At the institutional level, elected Republicans are rolling back voting rights, overturning ballot initiatives, criminalizing protest, stripping power from elected Democrats and sowing doubt about a valid election result.