Journos Admit Fear of Trump Victory Influenced Scant Reporting on Biden’s Cognitive Issues
“There was perhaps, even on an unconscious level, the notion that if you focus so much on Joe Biden’s age, you are somehow helping Donald Trump, who is in an entirely different category. He is a threat to democracy.”
In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s disastrous June debate performance, the mainstream media fell in line with the Democrat power players who sought to publicly shame Biden into withdrawing from the presidential race.
Fear of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump defeating a politically weakened Biden in November was the driving force behind their push, with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reportedly so terrified that she sent an “urgent message” to Biden in July while he battled COVID and threatened “to release humiliating polling data to back” up her belief he could not defeat Trump.
Amid all the feverish behind-the-scenes Democrat machinations at the time, some in the mainstream press were openly debating whether they dropped the ball with their scant coverage of Biden’s cognitive issues, insulting our intelligence by pretending they didn’t know how bad Biden truly was until after that debate performance.
What you’re witnessing this morning from the press is not some newfound commitment to honesty about the president’s condition, but rather complete rage that he didn’t do what he needed to in order to continue the lie they’ve been helping to legitimize. https://t.co/MlnGAZ8GTV
— a newsman (@a_newsman) June 28, 2024
A few, like CNN, all but outright admitted that they were reluctant to cover it in part because they feared it would help Trump:
Like all past presidents, Biden has good days and bad days. It can be tricky to report on something as difficult to define as a person aging, when his opponent is a convicted felon, who regularly lies and has threatened to use the government to go after his political opponents.
[…]
Still, this White House’s recent conduct with reporters pales in comparison to Trump’s team, which has done everything from revoking press access to reporters they disagree with, to calling reporters the “enemy of the people.”
Here we are some two months after the plan to force Biden to withdraw from the race was successful, and we have more reporters going on record with how their fears of a Trump victory influenced their thinking on whether or not to dig into Biden’s cognitive issues:
The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, MSNBC host and Politico White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire, “PBS NewsHour” correspondent Laura Barrón-López and The Guardian Washington bureau chief David Smith spoke about the media’s coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign at the Texas Tribune Festival earlier this month.
[…]
“There was perhaps, even on an unconscious level, the notion that if you focus so much on Joe Biden’s age, you are somehow helping Donald Trump, who is in an entirely different category. He is a threat to democracy,” Smith said. “And to me, that is another indication of how the Trump era has warped so much around it, you know, the normal scrutiny of a candidate and his [frail] condition by ‘Yeah, but on the other side there’s Trump.’ And Democrats would make that point.”
[…]
Baker called Biden’s age a “hard issue” to cover, but suggested journalists broadly need to do some “soul-searching” on how they handled it after the election.
“It’s very personal. Anybody who’s had a father or mother whose age and you talk to them by taking away their keys, these are not easy issues. That’s a sense of what the country is going through with Biden,” the Times correspondent said.
No, the only people “going through” those issues with Biden outside of his family and handlers were the press, who believed it was a “hard issue” to cover not because of the sensitivity of the subject but because they didn’t want to be seen lending credence to what they viewed at the time was a “right-wing talking point” that had the potential to derail Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
As it turned out, Biden outed himself in front of millions during that CNN debate. After that, the media knew they couldn’t hide it anymore – not just because the way their failure to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserved (instead of dismissing concerning video clips as “cheap fakes“) made them look but also because they knew if they didn’t act fast it was going to be too late to replace him as the Democrat nominee.
No matter which way you look at it, the media engaged in their own brand of election interference, trying to hide Joe Biden’s obvious health issues for the three and a half years before that debate, and then doing their part in the aftermath of it to pressure him to exit the race.
Mission accomplished.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Demes& Alzheimer’s is very duffel to recognize if you have never dealt with it
Yet it is very easy to recognize if you have dealt with it a couple of times
I have had several clients with Alzheimer’s so it’s easy for me to recognize
I saw that bide had a low to moderate level i. The summer of 2020
Anyone capable of rubbing two or more brain cells together knew Biden was a cabbage back in 2020.
Biden was never a dull tool at his best.
Delete “never”
Auto correct on cell phone is bad
Dementia & biden
Disable it.
“Dementia & Biden, how may I direct your call?”
autocorrect socks.
Good one, boss!
Autoincorrect
Funny how Dem soul searching always comes down to “But Trump makes us do these things…”
(‘that’s why Trump is a threat to democracy…because he makes us abandon democracy to win at all costs’)
Right? The Guardian reporter whining about not being able to accurately report, because… Trump.
I would think this sort of election interference from the media is the preeminent threat to “our democracy”.
Just report the FACTS and the TRUTH, That’s Job 1, and you can’t handle it.
And, by the way, it’s a REPUBLIC, not a “democracy”. Civics fail 101.
The media hasn’t been reporting facts in for ever. The media has no interest in the facts and the left in general strata the facts!
No, it’s both. People who insist that it’s a republic and not a democracy not only ignore the founders, who repeatedly called it a democracy, but they also don’t understand either term.
The founders NEVER called it a democracy. In fact, they went so far as to NEVER use that word in any form in any of the founding documents. They knew that democracies are doomed just as soon as people figure out that they can vote themselves largesse from the treasury.
And if I recall correctly, someone used almost those exact words.
I find that for the media, the term “Trump is a threat to democracy” roll off their tongues as fast as an assassin’s bullet, and is in fact, a type of assassination; it is a targeted shot designed to, as a Harris hack said, “extinguish” his voice.
Between the gag orders, censorship, mis- and malreporting, false narratives, taking things out of context, and totally misrepresenting what he says, the goal of the leftist Harris Hacks is to silence Pres. Trump.
I guess it is proof that his message to the American people is just that strong and resonates with the listener.
In the process, they are so extreme, that they advertise FOR him.
I guess KoolAid makes you stupid.
Yes, Trump is a nebulous “threat to democracy” when he is in fact a threat to their CLASS, of which MSM journos are fully paid up members.
Sometimes referred to incorrectly as the elites; properly known as the parasite class.
Journalists who deliberately mislead and misinform the public are, in fact, the “enemy of the people.” Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yes. There’s no offense in simply telling the truth about them.
The Democrats rigged the Trump-Biden debate to expose Biden’s dementia and provide an excuse to dump him. Biden was a very weak candidate— an almost sure loser. The Republicans fell for it. If only they had waited they would be in a better position now to win in November. A lot easier to build up Harris than to continue with Biden. My suburban Texas neighborhood has a lot of Harris signs. That’s worrisome.
The propaganda campaign for Harris has been amazingly effective. They started with a weak unpopular fumbling candidate who can’t do an interview, and created serious competition to Trump. Once again the Republicans have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Not known as the stupid party for nothing.
You can’t blame Republicans for the fact that the Democrats own the biggest pig-lipstick factory on the planet, plus the entire mainstream media to help them photoshop the pig into Aretha Franklin.
Well put. If the Republicans had refused any debates until after the conventions, they would be sitting pretty against Biden now. I said long ago that this election should have been for the next generation on both sides and the Republicans helped deliver it for the Democrats. My best hope now is that the Republicans control the Senate, as the House and Presidency look more iffy.
I live in a reliably blue county that probably hasn’t elected a Republican in the last 100 years and the local Democrats office has been packed to overflowing daily, for the last month. They are in a panic. Instead of two Harris yard signs, now people have 10-20 in their yard to make up for the people who refuse to participate. This manufactured Joy! is horrific. These same people, who call Trump an existential threat, are worried about what their fellow democrats will do to them if they don’t show a proper level of love and devotion to Kamala.
Considering the violence inherent and expressed by the Democrats for, well, everything, it is probably a reasonable concern.
And yet when the likes of CNN gets out in the streets they are hard pressed to find a black enthusiastic about Harris or will be voting for anyone but Biden.
But that’s not the point of the media whoring themselves. The point of creating this illusion is to fool you in to thinking the race is so tight that you won’t question it when the steal comes in on election night and the months after while they get creative with counting.
Biden = Trump 😂😂
Well, the stenographers for the DemoncRat party–known as the MSM–were outed when it was apparent the emperor had no clothes, or in this case no memory. The lesson here is that the MSM is simply not to believed, because if they have lied about this, what else have they been lying about?
And for that, today’s press is relegated to the ash heap. Worthless.
This is the same press that would scream at President Trump at every press conference. Literally scream there questions. Xiden is elected (right?) and suddenly their monotone polite questions are never answered by anyone in the administration.
And the media play it as if they aren’t complicit in this farce. FKB
In a continuation of the “Harris 100% positive, Trump 97% negative” coverage, there is the morning editorial popup from the NYTimes:
“Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president,” writes the editorial board, which enumerates the dangers of another Trump presidency.”
As much as the bile rises in my throat at the thought of reading it, it hides behind a paywall.
I would love to see how the NYTimes defines “patriotic.”
It is very difficult to have “the most secure election ever” if there is a possibility that Trump could win it.
Something has to be done about the media. It’s way too lopsided in favor of one political ideology and it’s hurting the country.
The only difficulty in covering Biden was strictly of their own making: how do we pump him up most credibly? Had the media covered him honestly, there would have been no dilemma to wrestle with, no question of “how do we cover Trump”, no deep soul=searching of trying to justify one’s lies when those lies are being repeatedly undermined.
The trauma in the media is entirely of their own making.
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