Eight years ago, President-elect Donald Trump nominated school choice advocate Betsy DeVos for secretary of education. Within days, major media outlets seemed intent on competing to see who could slime her most aggressively. That pretty much set the pace for her tenure.

Trump has now nominated a new secretary of education, former Small Business Administration chief and pro-wrestling executive Linda McMahon. And, right on schedule, after four years of fawning coverage of Miguel Cardona’s nomination and acquiescent treatment of his misbegotten tenure, education journalists have rediscovered their taste for ad hominem invective.

Of course, journalists should scrutinize a prospective secretary of education. They should ask hard questions about a nominee’s experience, knowledge, and character. But that scrutiny is only useful when it’s intent on truth. And that requires a consistent standard for reporting on nominees, a commitment to distinguishing established facts from unsupported allegations, and a belief that readers should hear from both critics and champions of a nominee.

Unfortunately, on each count, it’s fair to say that the press is failing abysmally. Again.

In its story “Her Wrestling Empire Was Said to Harm Children. Trump Chose Her for Education,” the New York Times quoted one Republican and five Democrats. (That was par for the course—across the Times’s various McMahon stories, critical voices outweigh positive ones three-to-one.) In its piece on the nomination, the only “right-leaning” source The 74 could muster was a fierce DeVos critic who has renounced his Republican affiliation. In a story headlined, “Where Does Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education Secretary Nominee, Stand on Key Issues?,” USA Today found it newsworthy that NEA president Becky Pringle, a relentless DeVos critic, deemed McMahon “unqualified,” “Betsy DeVos 2.0,” and committed to “undermin[ing]” and “privatiz[ing] public schools.” (Vitriolic Pringle quotes appear to be obligatory.) Meanwhile, the only pro-McMahon “quote” in the USA Today account was an offhand mention that McMahon’s “friend” DeVos was supportive on X. (Though the story didn’t even include a quote from DeVos’s tweet.)

In the weeks since McMahon was nominated, she’s tallied six stories in the New York Times, eight in USA Today, and five in the Washington Post. The headlines have a familiar feel: “Linda McMahon Made a Fortune with WWE. Wrestling Scandals Now Shadow Her Rise,” “Trump Pick Linda McMahon is Facing Her Own Sex Scandal,” or the aforementioned “Her Wrestling Empire Was Said to Harm Children. Trump Chose Her for Education.”

In 2020, things were very different. Between Miguel Cardona’s nomination and December 31, 2020, neither the Times nor USA Today devoted a story to him—while the Post’s coverage featured puffery like the editorial board’s cheery declaration that “Miguel Cardona Is an Inspired Choice to Lead the Nation’s Schools.” And it’s not like there weren’t interesting stories to be written about the record of this unknown education official who, for instance, had pioneered the first statewide ethnic studies course requirement.

Stories on McMahon feature rote (but lengthy) accounts of Trump’s campaign pledges but rarely bother to connect her experience to what the Department of Education actually does, which is manage student loans and financial aid—that it’s essentially a megabank with a bite-sized policy shop attached. Given that the next secretary will face an unprecedented clean-up after the FAFSA debacle and the detritus of Cardona’s loan cancellation schemes, having someone in the chair with a background in business operations or loan management might seem newsworthy.

Yet, the coverage has made little or no effort to explore McMahon’s tenure as chief at the Small Business Administration, her 81–19 Senate confirmation in 2017, or her business acumen. Instead, it’s featured weirdly dismissive shots at McMahon and her role in building a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Here’s the New York Times: “Linda McMahon, whose résumé mainly rests on running World Wrestling Entertainment, has faced questions for years over whether she is suitable for important education posts.” The Washington Post quoted a “pro wrestling expert” who explained, “Linda is this well-spoken, congenial, bright, well-dressed woman executive, but she helped run a testosterone-fueled business that was seen as very sleazy for a long time.” (“Was seen as . . .” Well, now. What an interesting use of the passive voice.)

The Education Week story on her nomination did include a solitary mention of her SBA tenure, noting, “During her time leading the SBA, the agency was criticized for the removal of resources for LGBTQ+ business owners; the webpage was later restored” (Missing: any discussion of her management style, track record, or performance at the agency.) Inside Higher Education did offer a couple paragraphs acknowledging McMahon’s skill set but seemingly first felt obliged to have a DEI scholar dismiss such considerations, asserting, “Absurdity when spoken aloud sounds like, ‘Let’s put the lady that led mostly faux entertainment wrestling in charge of our nation’s school system.’” (I’m no expert, but that doesn’t strike me as a very inclusive sentiment.)

The day after McMahon was nominated, the Washington Post homepage featured a triple-bylined attack piece on McMahon. The headline: “Trump’s Education Pick Once Incorrectly Claimed to Have an Education Degree.” The more one read, the sillier the attack got. You see, it turns out that McMahon earned a teaching certificate while pursuing her bachelor’s degree in the 1960s. About 40 years later, in 2009, she filled out a questionnaire by indicating she had a BA in teaching rather than a teaching credential and a BA in French. When this was pointed out, she corrected the record. That was the whole scoop. Seriously. Nonetheless, within 24 hours of McMahon’s nomination, the Post billed this wannabe scandal prominently on its site, and other outlets, including Newsweek and The Daily Beast, jumped on.

Just days after McMahon’s nomination, the legacy media began to uncritically relate the contents of a lawsuit alleging that, under her leadership, the WWE inadequately addressed allegations of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. The lawsuit has already been paused, but that can’t undo the hurried rush of speculative attacks that immediately tumbled forth. CNN has run three stories on McMahon, two of them on the lawsuit (including “Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education Pick, Was Sued for Allegedly Enabling Sexual Abuse of Children”). Four of the New York Times’s six pieces on McMahon have mentioned the suit.

In its coverage, The 74 reported, “Some senators will also question whether she’s fit to oversee an agency responsible for protecting students from sexual misconduct.” In its big story on the allegations, Education Week devoted nearly a dozen paragraphs to relating the charges; discussed allegations against other cabinet members; and quoted a political science professor asserting, “This, to me, is like a giant middle finger to the left and the rest of the country.” (The only sources quoted who weren’t Democrats and/or critics? McMahon’s attorney and me.)

As my AEI colleague Max Eden and I observed a couple weeks back:

These are potentially serious allegations. But they’re nothing more than that at this moment. The judicial process is at its best when it is used to carefully parse facts and dispense justice. It is at its worst when filings are used to score political points before the evidence has been weighed and the various claims adjudicated. It would be reassuring if we could trust the media to handle allegations deliberately or at least by a consistent standard, but we can’t.

The coverage of the lawsuit evinced little to no interest as to why the allegations might’ve languished for more than three decades, including 15 years after McMahon left the WWE—only to surface this fall. That was decidedly not how the same reporters covered allegations three years ago, in 2021, when Biden’s nominee for the number two post at the department of education was confronted with multiple lawsuits for failing to adequately address child sexual abuse. That nominee, former San Diego schools superintendent Cindy Marten, was confirmed without reporters ever noting she’d been accused of covering up the rape of a non-verbal special education student, refusing to discipline a teacher who groped female students, and firing an investigator who found evidence of sexual abuse.

Moreover, whereas McMahon is confronted with newly-surfaced allegations from the 1980s, Marten had been deposed about the recent charges. During one deposition, when asked whether another student forcing a kindergarten student to perform oral sex would be a “serious incident,” Marten answered, “It depends . . . Are other disabilities involved? . . . I need to know all of the facts before I determine the seriousness of it.” This was never reported by the legacy media, even though ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN all had the deposition. For McMahon, it seems every allegation will be breathlessly shared ad infinitum. For Marten, even documented evidence wasn’t worthy of notice.

This all feels awfully familiar.

In 2016, the New York Times greeted Secretary DeVos’s nomination with a headline feverishly insisting that DeVos (who’d never held public office) had “steered money from public schools.” What DeVos had actually done, of course, was advocate for state laws that allowed families to use taxpayer funds at a wider variety of schools. Within 72 hours of DeVos’s nomination, the Times published an op-ed from a professor explaining, “The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children,” while Salon’s Matthew Rozsa had concluded that DeVos “would be terrible for public education in this country.”

It was an unseemly, mindless pile-on. Politico’s story on DeVos’s nomination featured three critical quotes and a single supportive one (from me). There were predictable attacks from the presidents of both the NEA and AFT, with AFT president Randi Weingarten opining, “The sum total of her involvement [in education] has been spending her family’s wealth in an effort to dismantle public education in Michigan.” In a New Yorker story titled “Betsy DeVos and the Plan to Break Public Schools,” DeVos was attacked for the mission statement of the high school she attended. (It sought to “equip minds and nurture hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.”)

While the press had the odd habit of impugning DeVos for the troubled plight of Detroit’s schools (though she’d never held a position of authority in Michigan), none of Cardona’s coverage ever suggested that he, as Connecticut’s K–12 chief, ought to be held responsible for the abysmal performance of the state’s urban school systems. And, even though much of Cardona’s career had been spent as a mid-level district administrator in Connecticut’s 13th-largest school district, none of the coverage probed whether he was up to the task of overseeing a massive federal agency with over a trillion-dollar loan portfolio.

Once the National Education Association deemed Cardona a “consensus builder and problem solver,” that seemed to be good enough for education journalists, with major outlets dutifully depicting him as a “career educator” who “vowed to be a unifier.” NPR, noting that Biden had termed the unknown education bureaucrat an “easy choice,” included plaudits from the presidents of both the NEA and AFT (and not a single dissenting note).

Once Cardona took office, the media showed zero interest when he engaged in unprecedented partisanship—using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as a platform to promote Biden-Harris talking points, the NAEP civics release to launch attacks on Republican governors, or official department communications about student lending to condemn Republican officials. (That’s why you’ll notice all the links in this paragraph are to my stuff.) Indeed, a couple weeks ago, I was talking to a veteran education reporter who’d reached out amidst some of my reactions to the McMahon coverage. I mentioned this troubling double standard. The reporter genially admitted that this was the first they were hearing about these Cardona transgressions. That was kind of my point . . .

In 2023, Cardona mused to the Western Governors’ Association, “I think it was President Reagan who said, ‘We’re from the government. We’re here to help.’” Of course, Reagan’s actual quote was, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Whether Cardona was historically illiterate or just trolling Republican governors, one might’ve thought the secretary of education’s televised exercise in historical fiction would’ve raised eyebrows (especially given that he presided over historically awful U.S. history outcomes on NAEP). Yet his remarks went unnoted by the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, and Education Week. You could almost hear the crickets. If such a misstatement had been by DeVos rather than Cardona, I feel comfortable saying that the coverage would’ve been punishing. Heck, when DeVos happened to mention grizzly bears during her confirmation when discussing why gun control plays out differently in rural schools, a week of brutal media ridicule ensued.

This is not just a confirmation thing. Education journalism demonstrates a consistent, troubling ideological bias. An analysis of major newspaper coverage of DeVos and Cardona’s first 100 days showed that DeVos attracted much more coverage (and much more negative coverage) while she was still staffing up the department than Cardona when he was calling for hundreds of billions in emergency aid for shuttered schools. When it came to Biden’s loan forgiveness schemes, news accounts paid remarkably little attention to the legality, fairness, or logic of the proposal. This bias also shows up when writing about education developments outside the beltway. In coverage of the 2018 teacher strikes, union officials and teachers accounted for over half of all quotes, while just 5 percent of quotes were provided by parents or students affected by the strikes.

I wish things were otherwise. Back in January 2021, after four years of inexcusable smearing visited upon DeVos, I argued against adopting an eye-for-an-eye approach to coverage of Cardona’s nomination. At Education Week, I wrote:

Quite appropriately, [Cardona]’s met with a genial, respectful reception (pretty much the opposite of the one accorded Betsy DeVos, who was subjected to blistering attacks before she’d said a word). Now, a churlish observer might ask whether Cardona, with a background as an assistant superintendent in a small system and with a short tenure running a small state bureaucracy, has the management experience to run the U.S. Department of Education . . . [but] I’m not inclined to be churlish . . . I’d like to see Cardona judged by a more measured and fair-minded standard—and then see that standard applied uniformly to other education officials, left and right.

If education journalists employed a consistent, fair-minded standard in evaluating a prospective Secretary of Education, it would make for healthier public discourse. But I’m increasingly disinclined to believe that such a shift is a realistic ask. I suspect that’s why so many Americans have simply tuned the media out.

On the bright side, maybe Joe Rogan will interview McMahon. Then we might actually learn something about her qualifications and views.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”