Media's GOP Double Standard Bigotry Problem

It's easy enough for the media to lampoon Donald Trump as narrow-minded and mean-spirited for wanting to enforce immigration laws and to suspend Muslim migration from the Middle East to the US. But there's finally an article that highlights that these views aren't held just by Trump among current presidential contenders. The big problem according to Max Fisher is the media's double standard when it comes to reporting on Islamaphobia by Trump vs. the rest of the GOP field.

The key points:

But what is really striking to me about Rubio's comments is the media's reaction, which has been fairly muted in contrast to how it covered Islamophobic comments from Donald Trump. That's not to say that the media is endorsing or ignoring Rubio here, but the pretty clear distinction in coverage shows how an establishment candidate like Rubio can navigate the media's unwritten rules and get away with participating in the tide of Islamophobia that has already become violent.

He goes on to note:

What Rubio has revealed here, intentionally or not, is how a major political candidate can slip at least seemingly Islamophobic comments past the media without generating the same level of scrutiny and adversarial coverage that Trump has drawn...
This double standard became particularly transparent in December, when Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. The media, again, heaped open scorn on Trump — how dare he praise a murderous dictator and American adversary? And, indeed, it was deplorable...
But mainstream political figures had been praising Putin for years, often in the very same language, and it never drew the same media condemnation. But the media treated those comments, though substantially identical, as acceptable.

It's what happened when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley took issue with Trump's strident immigration stances (unnamed) while at the same time she was refusing to let Syrian refugees settle in her state and joined with 26 other states trying to over turn the Obama administration's immigration actions.

It's easy for the media to call out the prejudices of the marginalized, and much harder for those actually in power. Of course, it's just two institutional establishments winking and nodding at each other at the expense of the downtrodden.