Teetering

 "I don't know" what Newsom is "trying to do," said Fox News host Trace Gallagher, but it "comes across as childish." Given the longstanding rumors of Newsom's 2028 presidential ambitions, if he "wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious," said Fox News host and former George W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino.
Newsom's trolling roils critics and thrills fans

I've never been clear on why The Week seems to think that balanced political coverage seems to be just reporting what the various partisan cheer squads have to say about something. Of course Fox News hosts think that Gavin Newsom is being immature or unserious. Projecting disdain for whatever Democratic politicians are doing is effectively their whole job. If Trace Gallagher or Dana Perino honestly thought that Governor Newsom asking more like President Trump was an idea that would actually pay off, they certainly couldn't say so on air; there would be a revolt among the Republican faithful who have been shown willing to punish Fox News before when it didn't toe the party line. So why are necessarily partisan television hosts making predictably partisan comments considered newsworthy?

While the answer could be that The Week is primarily a UK publication, whose base readership might not be well-versed in American politics, it seems to me that a framing that educates those readers in the general partisan biases of news organizations (or perhaps, their audiences) would serve them better. I doubt that it's an unfamiliar concept; I've been given to understand that there are partisan news outlets in the United Kingdom, just as in the United States. (Although, to be fair, I don't read enough of The Week's UK coverage to know if they treat their partisan outlets in the same way they cover the ones stateside.)

But then, I alluded to audiences before, and that's a tougher nut to crack. Fox News has its deep-seated partisan bias, because the audience that it has cultivated over its lifetime is very much Republican, and for them, it doesn't feel like a bias. Just like for many people who consider themselves Left-of-Center, "reality has a liberal bias," or least that's how the saying went back in the day.

And this can result in news outlets judging things by who is doing them, rather than the thing being done. So Fox News hosts call out Governor Newsom as childish and unserious, while Slate writers level the same charges at President Trump. Because Fox's Republican-dominated audience and Slate's primarily Democratic one have made making those charges part of the price of watching or reading. And the advertisers, the people who really pay the bills at the end of day, want to make sure that their material is getting in front of as many eyeballs as it possibly can. And no-one is making a name for themselves by graphing out where they spend their money. And no one is selling advertising space by noting the public's role in all of this.