“America’s mainstream news media has largely failed in the Age of Trump and beyond in its responsibilities and obligations to engage in sustained pro-democracy journalism that educates, informs, and empowers citizens by holding the powerful responsible and then telling the public not just what is important and how they should think about it but then what to do about it.”
Chauncey DeVega, Salon, February 12, 2024]
Rebecca Davis O’Brien, a reporter for the New York Times, wrote an article about Joe Biden and Donald Trump and the “parallel concerns about age and mental acuity”. It was published last Saturday.
[W]hile Mr. Biden, 81, has been increasingly dogged by doubts and concerns about his advancing years from voters, Mr. Trump, who is 77, has not felt the same political blowback.
The response suggests profound differences not only between the two men, but in how they are perceived by the American public, and in what their supporters expect of them — a divide that could play a major role in the coming presidential election. . . .
Some of it comes down to basic physical differences.
Mr. Biden’s voice has grown softer and raspier, his hair thinner and whiter. He is tall and trim but moves more tentatively than he did as a candidate in 2019 and 2020, often holding his upper body stiff, adding to an impression of frailty. And he has had spills in the public eye: falling off a bicycle, tripping over a sandbag.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan. He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.
“It is the perception of how you communicate,” said Carol Kinsey Goman, a speaker and coach on leadership presence. “When Trump makes those kinds of faux pas, he just brushes it off, and people don’t say, ‘Oh, he’s aging.’ He makes at least as many mistakes as Joe Biden, but because he does it with this bravado, it doesn’t seem like senility. It seems like passion.”
With Mr. Biden, Ms. Goman said, “it looks like weakness.” . . .
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
The Times usually hides its support of Trump much better than that. The weekend crew might need some more training.
O’Brien does bring up a decent point late in the piece, about how Trump’s epic narcissism and lifelong obsession with image gives him a possible advantage when appearing in public. But she doesn’t do much with it beyond a few more Alpha Trump quotes.
Most average citizens might be unable to look past the artifice (though it’s admittedly difficult when all that is presented is artifice), but, in an ideal world, journalists — especially those employed by the top newspapers, magazines, and networks in the world — should look behind the curtain as a matter of course and accurately present and analyze what the average citizen cannot see and hear, combine disparate threads together, and inform those citizens in clear English without bias. That’s not merely my suggestion or a hope. It’s the goddamn job description.
The media neither forgot nor learned its collective lesson from 2016, when Trump ran rings around them. They are not here to learn. They have no interest in learning. And there are no teachers. The top political reporters in the country know what they are doing. That’s how they became the top political reporters in the country. I don’t know how many of them are considered smart, but every last one of them is smarter than Trump. He’s not fooling anyone with a media credential. They report on him while fully understanding what they are doing and how they are doing it. Trump takes advantage of them time and time again because they willingly allow themselves to be taken advantage of time and time again. It’s an arrangement that works well for both parties. [I was typing away and initially wrote “arraignment”.]
Media Matters recently published an excellent look at how much coverage the liberal media is giving to Trump’s brain glitches: “National Broadcast and Cable Networks are Barely Covering Trump’s Recent Gaffes and Incoherent Statements”. Trump has offered different excuses lies for his demented statements: they were intentional or they never happened (created by AI).
This is from the New York Times and it is real (and decidedly not spectacular):
Matt Gertz, Media Matters, February 9, 2024
A Trump-appointed prosecutor dropped an unfalsifiable partisan bomb on President Joe Biden Thursday, playing into a years-long right-wing media campaign — and U.S. political journalists decided to treat it as a valid and impartial charge. . . .
Enter Robert Hur. Attorney General Merrick Garland presumably selected him as a special counsel to investigate Biden’s possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records because he thought he could quell potential complaints of political bias by putting in charge a former clerk to right-wing judges whom Trump appointed as a U.S. attorney with every incentive to do maximum political damage to the Democratic president. . . .
On Thursday, after a year-long investigation, Hur issued a 345-page report in which he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” and that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” But rather than stop there, he also levied an incendiary and gratuitous attack on Biden’s mental status, claiming that, “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” . . .
The right jumped on Hur’s claims, with Republican politicians and right-wing commentators falsely claiming that the special counsel had found that Biden “is not competent to stand trial” and “has dementia.” Some called for the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.
The mainstream political press, meanwhile, turned Hur’s insinuations about Biden’s mental health — and not his declination to prosecute — into the report’s big takeaway. Here’s a sampling of top headlines from major newspapers, political tipsheets, and digital outlets on Thursday and Friday.
New York Times: “Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024”
Semafor Flagship: “DoJ report questions Biden’s memory”
Washington Post: “Special counsel report paints scathing picture of Biden’s memory”
Wall Street Journal: “Biden’s Age Back in Spotlight After Special Counsel Report, Verbal Flubs”
CNN: “Biden tries to lay to rest age concerns, but may have exacerbated them”
ABC News: “Special counsel blows open debate over Biden age and memory”
CBS News: “Biden disputes special counsel findings, insists his memory is fine”
Politico: “Age isn’t just a number. It’s a profound and growing problem for Biden”
Stories about Biden’s mental state are clearly catnip for political journalists. They can demonstrate how “fair” they are by providing negative coverage of Biden to balance their treatment of his likely opponent Donald Trump, who is an unhinged authoritarian facing scores of federal and state criminal charges, including for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election. . . .
On NPR, Mara Liasson said that the White House is pushing back by pointing out that Biden’s foes, like Fox’s Sean Hannity and Trump, have had similar mix-ups.
“But the difference is that one of these missteps, one of these guys who forgets things, Biden, has become a viral meme, and it's become a big problem for him,” she said. “Trump’s misstatements, for some reason, have not risen to that level.”
It’s true that Trump’s own verbal missteps have not coalesced into an overarching narrative about his mental fitness for office. But the reason why is obvious: Political journalists decided to treat Biden’s missteps as a big problem, and Trump’s as a small one. They’re setting the agenda, following the lead of the Republican Party, the right-wing media, and now, Hur.
I find it amazing how often the media point to the one-sided coverage they produce and then attempt to investigate why this coverage appears so one-sided. I always think of when crack cocaine was all the rage in the 1990s. You’d turn on the news (“all the networks”) and it was crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack. Followed immediately by: “Our recent poll found that a majority of Americans are very worried about crack.”
Gertz surveyed the first 24 hours of coverage aftre the release of Hur’s report.
Judd Legum at Popular Information (February 12, 2024) looked at four days of reporting.
Robert Hur, the Republican special prosecutor assigned to investigate President Biden, is a lawyer, not a doctor. . . . In the report, Hur also opined, based on a few hours of interviews, that Biden had a “poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” Hur lacks any qualifications to arrive at these medical opinions. . . .
[Mainstream media] treated Hur’s amateur medical judgments as a political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his reelection campaign. . . . A Popular Information analysis found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles about Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory in the four days following the release of Hur’s report. Incidents that raised questions about former President Trump’s mental state received far less coverage by the same outlets.
From February 7-10:
The New York Times published 30 stories about Biden’s alleged memory issues (by 24 reporters, four opinion columnists, and the Times editorial board). Being cleared of any wrongdoing was described (in the objective articles) as “a political disaster” for Biden, “a political nightmare”, “a new political crisis”, and “a political mess”, which inflicted “searing political damage” and was “a gift” to Republicans. (Biden’s “advanced age” was also mentioned.) Opinion columnists with no medical credentials stated Biden was slipping “into dementia” and “should not be running for re-election”. The Times’ editorial board called the report “a dark moment for Mr. Biden’s presidency.” (Again, this was concerning a report that Biden would NOT be charged.)
Only one of the Times’ 30 stories mentioned that Hur is completely unqualified to render a judgment on anyone’s mental capacity. That story was by health reporter Gina Kolata; her article did not appear in the newspaper’s print edition.
The Washington Post produced 33 articles. Like the Times, the Post highlighted this “scathing picture of Biden’s memory”, this “damning” and “devastating picture of [Biden’s] mental agility”. Only one of those 33 articles (by health reporters, again) pointed out the inconvenient truth that Hur is wholly unqualified to offer medical opinions.
The Wall Street Journal published only 18 articles. Legum notes that these articles were more caustic than either the Times or Post, asserting that Hur’s report revealed that Biden was in “cognitive decline” and had “a failing short-term memory”. Columns included “Special Counsel: Biden Too Forgetful to Prosecute”, “Biden’s Doddering Document Defense", and “A Tipping Point on Biden’s Decline”. None of the Journal’s articles reported that Hur’s evaluation of Biden’s mental health has no medical basis. I guess they employ zero health reporters.
81 articles and only two of them saw any reason to tell readers that Hur was pulling his medical diagnosis directly out of his ass. If a “lapse” like that happens on two or three different days, you should be suspicious. If it happens every day for decades, well, . . .
Like Hur, I am also not a doctor (or even a “medical doctor”) but it’s obvious to me that Biden is not all there, and he has not had all his marbles for several years. Both Mr. You-Know-The-Thing and Trump are horrible candidates for president. If I still lived in the US, I would not vote for Genocide Joe. I would not participate in an utterly broken and corrupted system. I would not give it any legitimacy. And I would complain. The Democrats should not have allowed Biden to run for a second term, but it’s too late now. I can easily see a scenario in which Trump defeats Biden in November.
Speaking of Dictator Don, he has said numerous crazy, wrong, or incomprehensible things for weeks (and months and years). According to Trump, he won the 2020 election (and claims to have “lots of evidence”, despite never revealing any of it in the 60 court cases he lost), warned Biden could lead the US into World War II (during a bit about Biden being “cognitively impaired”), beat Barack Obama in the 2016 election (he’s confused Obomna and Biden at least seven times), is running against Obama for 2024 (and leading him “by a lot” [I suppose that’s true, Obama is at 0%]), confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi not once, but four times, did not know what Iowa town he was speaking in, President Jeb Bush got the US involved in the Middle East, Viktor Orban is “the leader of Turkey”, Hungary and Russia share a border, his father was born in Germany (wrong; NYC), Puerto Rico is not part of the United States, and the moon is part of Mars. This is in addition to telling his supporters both not to vote and to vote twice (thereby committing voter fraud), referring to Hamas most of the time as “hummus”, claiming windmills kill whales and cause cancer, and being unable to say various words (“yesterday is a hard word for me”) and the WaPo’s low-ball count of 30,573 public lies while in office. He has referred to his wife as Melanie and misspelled his own last name twice (“Ttump”) on social media. Oh, and when he was arrested in April, he said (with a straight face, presumably) he was 6-3, 215.
They look so much alike . . . but the red hat gives him away.
The liberal media has been covering for Trump and not reporting or down-playing his statements and actions for years. Another item to disappear down the memory hole (and be termed a conspiracy theory when it’s brought up later) is Trump’s boast to NRA members in Pennsylvania last week: “During my four years . . . there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield.”
Trump said “nothing happened” when he was president, referring either to stricter gun laws or mass shootings. During Trump’s four years in office, there were 1,714 mass shootings (four or more people killed/wounded), with 1,679 deaths and 7,355 injuries. There were two school shootings on the day of Trump’s inauguration, the first of 146 school shootings during his term.
After a school shooting in Iowa not too long ago, Trump — who once told a crowd (after yet another school shooting, in Florida) he would have run into the building to disarm an active shooter “even if I didn’t have a weapon” — told Iowans to “get over it”.