On the latest episode of The Editors podcast, Charlie Cooke excoriated the media for its disparate treatment of mass shootings.

He noted the different coverage of the carnage at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., and a similar racist attack in Buffalo last year.

“This is about the worst thing a person can do, especially in the American South, with its history. If we teach anything, it’s that hating people based on their immutable characteristics is wrong, and hurting them because of it is the depths of sin. . . . Once again, we see the press corps treating Florida differently than New York,” said Cooke. “Yesterday, there was a press conference at the White House, and a reporter from NPR invited the president’s spokesman to connect this terrible act to Ron DeSantis’s opposition to DEI and to the school curriculum here.”

“By what mechanism could these two things possibly be linked? It’s absurd.”

He continued, “But when a mass killing happened in Buffalo, N.Y., the press didn’t say a word to Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York. They didn’t blame her. They didn’t look for reasons that it could have been her fault. They didn’t throw up non sequiturs, or insinuations, or smears.”

“Why didn’t the press do this to Hochul?” he asked. “It’s because the press shares Hochul’s politics. Effectively, this is an extortion racket. In America, if the politics of the politician is shared by the media, then the media agrees not to blame that politician for things that aren’t that politician’s fault. But if the media doesn’t share that politician’s politics, well, then you get a visit from Uncle Salvatore, then you get blamed for things you couldn’t possibly have done. Then the press will use any tragedy or abomination to push against a set of unrelated politics that it dislikes.

“It is a disgrace and it is counterproductive and it pulls us backwards in time and it divides people when they don’t need dividing.”

The Editors podcast records twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays.