My latest piece over at @mmfa: when Democrats are in power, journalists seem to care a whole lot more about bipartisanship than when Republicans control the government https://www.mediamatters.org/joe-biden/after-years-shrugging-trumps-lack-interest-working-democrats-press-suddenly-cares-about

One argument that I've seen people make for why it was always just assumed that Trump was going to barrel ahead without reaching out to Democrats while Biden is being held to a different set of standards is that Biden called for "unity" while Trump didn't.

And it's truth that there wasn't really an expectation that Trump would make good faith efforts to work with Democrats to get things passed. For instance, from December 2016: https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/cnns-dana-bash-i-dont-think-trump-has-reach-out-people-didnt-vote-him

But a.) there's nothing particularly unique about Biden saying he wants unity. All presidents do. No one explicitly runs on trying to divide the country, not even Trump. and b.) here's a quote from Trump's victory speech:

A lot of reporting from 2017 to 2020 (and especially 2017-2018) was based on this idea that Trump didn't really have a responsibility to reach out to Democrats. I went and looked back at how GOP efforts to wipe out the ACA or enact tax reform went, and the reporting was always...

...based on the idea that it was totally fine and actually expected that Trump would go it alone and only get Republican support for a bill. There was very little, "oOoOoOoh noOoOoOo is it too partisan!?!?" stuff.

If you remember the process of passing the ACA, it was frustrating because Democrats reached out to Republicans, incorporated Republican ideas into the bill, voted on Republican amendments to it... and then... they all voted against it.

After the ACA became law, here's how NYT wrote about it... Just... what...? https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/health/policy/22assess.html

However news organizations want to cover government, that's up to them. But they should at least be consistent. Instead, it's very clear that coverage switches based on which party is in control.

Hell, just days after Obama was inaugurated Chuck Todd asked the press sec whether Obama would veto his own recovery bill to stop the economy from taking a nosedive if it didn't get enough Republican votes

I think that part of the problem is that rather than reporting on the functioning of government (policy, who is proposing what, who will benefit, who will suffer under a piece of legislation), a lot of media outlets obsess over covering politics, which is slightly different.