The weekend before the RNC gathering in Cleveland, the big political story that was trending on Twitter among a lot of media pundits and reporters was not that Mike Pence was the vice presidential nominee of Donald Trump, but that he and his family dared to dine at Chili’s before heading back to the airport to board the plane for Indiana after the announcement in New York City. Can you imagine? A rich guy like Mike Pence trying to pretend to be a normal person and eat at Chili’s? In New York City, home of some of the finest dining options on the planet? Oh, the mockery that followed. I dropped a tweet that asked why this was a thing more than Hillary Clinton’s cringe-inducing Pokemon Go joke at a campaign rally a few days earlier.

Alex Burns, one of a stable of great political reporters at the New York Times, pushed back immediately and asked how it is that I didn’t notice that everyone mocked Hillary. Well, there was reporting on the Hillary line to be sure, and there was some careful ribbing of her, but certainly not with the same intensity with which people on Twitter went after Pence.

This weekend, after the Republican Convention was over, another story dropped in the media, one that included upwards of 20,000 emails lifted from the Democratic National Committee earlier in the year by Guccifer, and released by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks. John Sexton has the basics of the story here.

Now before continuing, let me go on the record that I am not a fair weather fan of Mr. Assange because his expose this time hurts Democrats. I believe him to be a creep, anti-Semite, accused rapist, and someone who hacked our national security apparatus and published some of America’s most guarded secrets. He should be incarcerated. Regardless of the character of the man, which I find to be repulsive, the facts are that these emails are now out there, and they show what many on the right have known to be true for a long, long time – that the DNC from the beginning of this campaign cycle had a favorite in the race, Hillary Clinton, and that they worked hand-in-glove with the media arm of the DNC, the mainstream media, to make sure she was the party’s nominee.

In a tweet this past Friday, I compared the Melania Trump plagiarism story to the DNC-MSM-Wikileaks release. While the two stories are not perfectly analogous, they both are headaches that tripped up their respective conventions virtually at the outset, and they both are telling in how the media covers, or doesn’t cover as the case may be, the conventions in the same way. Blake Hounshell of Politico responded when I tweeted that MSM wigged out for days over three borrowed passages from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech, and offered the sound of crickets when dealing with the DNC-MSM story. He pointed me to the front page on the New York Times’ website that dealt with the latter. (I note that the story Hounshell referred me to wasn’t exactly on the front page, but merely a sidebar story with a link to click through. The Melania Trump story dominated the Times’ site all day on Tuesday.)

What’s been instructive about this is Twitter, and how the pundits are reacting to it all on Twitter. So I spent a little bit of time this weekend to see how the New York Times’ political reporters, not all of them, but for this discussion, Maggie Haberman, the aforementioned Alex Burns, Nick Confessore, and Jonathan Martin, covered the Melania Trump story and the DNC-Wikileaks story. (Full disclosure: Haberman, Burns, Confessore, Martin, as well as Blake Hounshell, have all been repeated guests on the Hugh Hewitt Show, and I believe all to be very good political reporters.) But if you want to see what soft media bias looks like, inspect their Twitter feeds. What follows are the tweets written by the four New York Times political reporters, and only the retweets on which they comment. Simple retweets that do not warrant their personal commentary are not included.

First up is Maggie Haberman on the Melania Trump plagiarism story, which was certainly an unforced error by the Trump team, but not a fatal one being that Mrs. Trump is not currently a candidate for any elected office:

That’s a lot. When Wikileaks released the DNC emails on Friday, there was only a retweet by Ms. Haberman that pointed to a Washington Post Joe Fridayesque ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ report.

By Sunday afternoon, she had commented on a tweet by CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, who broke the news that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, would now not have a speaking role or much of any role at the DNC convention in Philly this coming week, a development that’s pretty remarkable when you think about it.

Maggie Haberman ‏@maggieNYT 11h11 hours ago

Holy cow Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT

Though this might just be staving off inevitable sustained booing..

Notice she’s not piling onto the story like earlier in the week, but instead trying to offer explanations for why the move was made. Next up is Alex Burns. This is what he wrote about the Melania Trump story on Twitter:

When the Wikileaks story broke, Alex retweeted several tweets that pointed out how much of a creep and an anti-Semite Julian Assange is, and did not comment directly on the facts of the emails or their potential impact on the start of the convention. His timeline was spent indirectly attacking the messenger, Assange, rather than the actual story. Nick Confessore covered the Melania Trump speech this way on Twitter:

Nick was mentioned in the emails, and has publicly bristled at the characterization he was involved in conspiring with the DNC to hurt Bernie and help Hillary.

Finally, Jonathan Martin on the Melania Trump speech:

When it comes to the Wikileaks story on the DNC, however, Jonathan is not having any of it.

Again, fine reporters all, but perhaps with a bit of a blind spot when it comes to covering stories damaging to Democrats. Part of the revelation of the Wikileaks emails include an instance where at least one reporter, Ken Vogel of Politico, was offering his story to the DNC coms office ahead of time before the story even went to Politico’s editors.

Now ask yourself if the same reporters in MSM would have offered that same courtesy to the RNC coms department?

Update: By Sunday night, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is no longer the chair of the DNC, and Vice Chair Donna Brazille has become the acting chair, and has apologized to the Bernie camp for the treatment he received from the DNC. I can’t remember the last time the chair of a political party was shown the door on literally the eve of the convention. And yet MSM, on Twitter anyway, doesn’t seem to want to talk about this, other than defensively, like they did at length for four days with the Melania Trump story. We’ll get to this and a lot more on the Monday edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show, which is heard nationally on the Salem Radio Network from 6-9AM Eastern, and also on Hugh’s website.