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Right-leaning media skeptics have long believed that the press corps tends to ignore leftist policy failures—except when they can be used to cast conservatives as opportunistic and self-interested critics of the failures. Some years back this column was unable to find evidence that media reports of Republicans pouncing on the shortcomings of their opponents were more common than reports of Democrats pouncing, and in fact a Factiva search suggested the opposite was true. But this week it’s hard to ignore the way many major publications have been covering a grisly crime largely as a new front in a battle of political narratives. “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right,” says a New York Times headline. The subhead declares: Security footage capturing the unprovoked stabbing in Charlotte became an accelerant for conservative arguments about the perceived failings of Democratic policies. Here’s how the story from Eduardo Medina, Richard Fausset and
Emily Cochrane begins:
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