From the left: Dems the Media Hope You Forget

A recent “curious graphic” on CNN that left off Andrew Yang can’t be “chalked off to a simple error,” Krystal Ball notes at The Hill — it’s “part of a persistent pattern of ignoring Yang’s candidacy,” with Yang omitted in graphics on multiple networks. Much-Googled Tulsi Gabbard also gets few media hits; Bernie Sanders “accurately cited academic research” but managed to get three “Washington Post” Pinocchios anyway; Marianne Williamson is mocked for tweeting about “the power of prayer.” None “fit the mold” the media and establishment expect for a Democratic nominee, Ball sighs. Yet “candidates who don’t conform may be exactly what the country needs,” even if “they are precisely what the media scorns.”

Tech beat: Begin the Google, Facebook Breakup

The investigations launched by 48 state attorneys general against Google and Facebook represent “the first real American strike at the problem” of “central control of information,” Matt Stoller argues at The Guardian. These corporations “use their control of the flow of information to monopolize advertising revenue, killing newspapers across the country and around the world and eliminating potential competitors in a host of areas,” as well as “capturing practically” all online ad revenue. Businesses need Facebook and Google, but Facebook and Google don’t need any particular business — leading to a “stark” power imbalance. “These corporations have become too powerful to be contained by democratic societies,” but in the bipartisan attorney general investigations antitrust “leadership” may be on its way back.

Election watch: ‘Dark Money’ Targets Collins

Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ race for a fourth term “is shaping up to be one of the costliest and most contentious in the country,” reports Susan Crabtree at RealClearPolitics. Collins, a moderate Republican, knew “her pivotal vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh” would hurt her with liberals, but she “didn’t expect shadowy ‘dark money’ liberal groups to spring up in Maine and start flinging arrows at her more than a year before voters go to the polls.” One dark-money group, Maine Momentum, put up an ad claiming that Collins is risking Social Security and Medicare, a claim independent fact-checkers call completely false. “Where’s the money coming from?” Collins asked in a radio interview. Her opponents “obviously have a lot of it.”

Culture watch: The Wisdom of ‘Bullwinkle’

“The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” the “cornball classic” cartoon about “a moose and squirrel navigating Cold War politics,” was “pretty subversive stuff for a children’s program made at the height of the Cold War,” Beth Daniels reminisces at Smithsonian after the death of June Foray, who voiced Rocky and other characters. The show’s “gloss of adult sophistication” was “completely undercut by silliness” — of the same type as “Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, Nichols May, and Woody Allen.” The humor “loved to take a whack at the Eisenhower status quo, not to mention psychoanalysis and the Bomb.” Its patriotism was “backhanded,” “tempered with gentle skepticism going back to vaudeville, a sort of atavistic psychic tool chest for navigating strange and scary times,” and its influence “lives on today” in everything from “SpongeBob SquarePants” to “The Simpsons.”

From the right: Trump ‘Pocket-Lining’ That Isn’t

Based on a Politico report, “House Democrats are investigating whether the Air Force’s stops” at Prestwick Airport in Scotland are benefitting the nearby Turnberry resort owned by President Trump, Byron York reports at the Washington Examiner. Yet Politico’s piece “omitted so much important information that it hardly qualified as a story at all.” For one thing, “the Air Force signed a contract for refuelings at Prestwick in 2016, before the Trump administration entered office.” For another, a State Department review of area hotel rates (after a previous pseudo-scandal) found that Turnberry’s rates were more than competitive. So, “did an ‘odd’ refueling stop ‘line the president’s pockets’? Given what is known so far, that’s a hard accusation to support.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann