Ah, whataboutism. It's not a magical word. You can't say "wingardium whatabousa", wave your wand, and make all your own hypocricies disappear. To me - and this

Ah, whataboutism. It's not a magical word. You can't say "wingardium whatabousa", wave your wand, and make all your own hypocricies disappear. To me - and this is my own standard, not a set of rules - whataboutism a fallacy is specifically used to avoid acknowledging a problem by derailing the discussion. If a person fully and thoroughly acknowledges a problem, and does not minimize the importance of that problem, then it is not whataboutism to point out the hypocrisy of the other side during the analysis - especially if someone denies or minimizes the existence of bias from the other side. In short, an article like this from The Atlantic (including a reference to an early pandemic NYTimes article that claimed advocating for travel bans was racist) is not whataboutism. These are not just reasonable but important observations: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-really-doomed-americas-coronavirus-response/608596/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-... And lastly, while I agree with you about much of Trump and right wing media, I was pretty aghast with the times, WaPo, and other media outlets (this link also from The Atlantic). To be fair the National Review also got this wrong at first. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must... As an aside, The Atlantic is an interesting publication - it is a very left leaning, but has a number of writers who are absolutely willing to go straight at the left when they feel it is behaving hypocritically.