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This is a story worth diving into, if nothing but to reveal the mechanics of the media machine.

Here's how it actually works when the press and the Democratic Party decide they like someone: they post long, flattering profiles, the red flags get explained away, and the ugliest facts get buried just until the moment protecting him stops being useful.

Graham Platner is the clearest example we've seen in years, and this week the whole arrangement came apart.

Platner is the progressive Democrat who won the Senate primary in Maine. He was sold to voters as a working-class oyster farmer, even though he's admitted he makes little money from oysters and that it isn't how he actually earns a living. (His incredibly rich family sent him to an elite prep school in Connecticut.)

He has a Nazi tattoo. He has a long Reddit history calling himself a communist, trashing the police, and in one post telling rape victims to "take some responsibility." Multiple women have accused him of abuse.

None of it slowed the machine down. At first, it did the opposite.

The New York Times opinion page did a lot of the early lifting. Columnist Michelle Goldberg went to Maine and wrote that he was "nothing like the edgelord caricature" she'd seen online, comparing his energy to Obama's. When the tattoo story broke, she wrote a column headlined "Graham Platner Is No Nazi."

Another Times columnist, Frank Bruni, ran one titled "If Democrats Have Appropriate Fear of Trump, They Will Elect Platner." The news coverage was flattering, with early profiles across the Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine that helped build the persona while the scandals got brushed aside as right-wing smears.

Times reporter Jodi Kantor drew criticism for arguing on CNN that the conduct didn't meet the #MeToo threshold she covers. Socialist commentator Cenk Uyghr claimed the Platner Nazi tattoo story was fake. Ana Kasparian dismissed the scandal and blamed the women for not reporting the rape earlier.

“There are no saints in the United States Senate,” Bernie Sanders said.

The art of the profile

And they loved Platner’s persona. He hates Israel and capitalism, and has the same animosity towards the American system as the rising socialists. But he doesn’t use that label, and has the looks of someone they hoped could attract former Trump voters. They thought he could be the future, their guy to stoke a revolution.

Then, The New York Times ran a piece on him last month, detailing his pattern of drinking too much and becoming threatening with ex-girlfriends. One account came from a woman named Lyndsey Fifield, an ex-girlfriend who accused Platner of abuse but was largely dismissed because she's a Republican.

She's now blasting the paper for claiming it "could not corroborate" her allegations, even though she provided extensive evidence and a long list of potential witnesses — most of whom the Times never even contacted. This happened just before the primary election, which Platner won.

“Off the record”

And here's the part that matters most. That account, damning as it was, wasn't the full story. Another woman, Jenny Racicot, had told the Times more than it printed — she didn't want to be publicly known as a rape victim, so the worst of it stayed off the record.

The paper has since acknowledged its article reflected "what the women were and were not willing to share at the time." Translation: they knew there was more. So did the Democrats promoting him.

This week, Racicot went on the record. She told Politico, and then CNN, that in late 2021 Platner entered her rural Maine home uninvited and drunk and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. (Politico didn’t call it “rape,” but CNN’s Jake Tapper did.)

Within hours, the same Democrats who'd spent months defending him turned all at once: Schumer and Gillibrand called on him to quit, the party's Senate campaign arm said it wouldn't fund the race, and even Bernie Sanders — his single biggest national booster — told him to step aside.

It’s important to note that the left-leaning press and Democrats talk to each other constantly, and the idea that the people boosting Platner had no clue the private accusations were darker seems very unlikely.

His campaign was being outspent, and it seemed like an uphill battle. The media protection held right up until protecting him stopped being worth it.

Dropping out

Platner isn't finished because the mainstream press finally dug up the truth. He's finished because people outside the media apparatus refused to let the story die. An ex-girlfriend posted her account on X after the Times buried it.

Reporters and independent outlets kept asking the questions the people with access didn't want asked, until it became impossible to ignore. Only then did the same media and the same politicians who'd covered for him all year suddenly find their conscience.

That's our job. Doing the digging when the powerful would rather we didn't, and refusing to look away when the mainstream does. This is what we do every single morning, and almost nobody else is going to do it for you.

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