Is that what is happening? Or has the Protection Racket Media simply exited "suck-up mode" after many years of covering for the other side?

Imma stop you right there, Axios. Their reporters notice that media outlets seem to have abandoned their 24/7/365 La Resistance to Donald Trump, and calls that a "suck-up moment":

Amid a record media trust deficit, outlets once critical of Trump are now making overtures to the former and future president, and the majority of American voters who voted for him.

• TIME magazine not only named Trump "Person of the Year," but the magazine's CEO, Jessica Sibley, chanted "USA! USA!" alongside the president-elect as he rang the New York Stock Exchange opening bell.
• A week after Trump's victory, two executives from TelevisaUnivision, the parent of the largest U.S.-based Spanish-language broadcaster, flew to Mar-a-Lago so the president-elect could personally thank them for election support, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong vowed (on Fox News, no less) to balance out his editorial board with conservative voices. He also has discussed plans to add a digital "bias meter" for editorials and opinion columns.
• Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (who, like Soon-Shiong, overruled his staff to kill a Harris endorsement) said at The New York Times' DealBook Summit earlier this month that he's "actually very optimistic" about Trump's second term.

Ahem. How does Axios think that the "record media trust deficit" occurred in the first place? Their very next bullet point makes it pretty obvious, emphasis mine:

 Compare that to the resistance media era that started in 2016, with outlets like The Washington Post garnering tough-on-Trump reputations (and thousands of subscriptions).

• This time around, national outlets — struggling to regain viewers and subscribers — are trying to signal they're no longer out for blood.

The mainstream media has been out for Trump's blood for nearly ten years now, and everyone knows it. They have not covered Trump fairly during that period; news organizations not only cast almost every story about Trump in negative terms, they rushed to support the Democrats' wildest fantasies about Trump, including "pee tapes," Russia collusion, and all sorts of conspiracy-theory nonsense.

And at the same time, the same media outlets spent all of that time refusing to cover scandals involving Democrats. The bias-unto-malice of the Protection Racket Media became most apparent in the Hunter Biden laptop story, which media orgs not only ignored but actively tried to suppress on behalf of Joe Biden. They dutifully reported Biden's spin that it was "Russian disinformation" as fact and used it for innumerable "fact checks" and arguments about the dangers of disinformation, right up until the Department of Justice used it to indict Hunter Biden for several crimes. Even to this day, the Protection Racket Media will still occasionally suggest that the Russians were behind the Hunter Biden laptop story, especially in attempting to ret-con Joe Biden's reneging on his promise not to pardon Hunter.

Nor is that the only scandal that the media has buried in the past four years. Reporters and their media outlets are only now beginning to acknowledge that they helped hide Biden's cognitive decline, at least from the earliest moments of his presidency but in actuality as early as the primary debates in 2019. The media buried this issue when it became clear that Biden had a shot at winning the nomination and could defeat Trump's re-election effort, as my friend John Podhoretz pointed out over the weekend:

Can I point out that the implicit subject of the first five or six Democratic debates in 2019 was whether or not Biden was senile? Remember Julian Castro in September 2019? The coverup began THEN because Biden was 10 points up in the polls. https://t.co/l1j14a3W0C

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 20, 2024

The mainstream media suppressed perhaps the worst constitutional crisis and scandal in American history because they wanted to keep Trump from any political benefit. And let us not forget the past four months of desperate attempts to keep Kamala Harris afloat as Biden's last-minute replacement when that cover-up collapsed. Her word salads got treated as "brat," her avoidance-tic cackling as "joy," and her utter refusal to engage the media got ignored entirely while the media painted Trump as the one who would refuse accountability. 

The Protection Racket Medis sold out completely, sucking up to Democrats on a scale and scope that had no precedent in modern American history. And yet, Trump managed to defeat the entire corrupt establishment. Now those same media outlets are having second thoughts about whoring themselves out to the Democrat-Academia elite clique, and Axios thinks that is a "suck-up moment." Maybe they've just decided to stop sucking altogether in multiple senses of the word.