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.
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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