thehunter said:
Got two links read to go for you pi guy, but I have one condition given your track record here of demanding receipts but never giving anything (a bad habit of leftists): if you can acknowledge that CNN, MSNBC, the Democrats and most leftists attempted to deceive the American public by hiding/denying Joe Biden's obvious senility till June 2024 and, in the case of Kamala Harris and the cabinet, were derelict in their constitutional duty (25th amendment) to remove him from office for the aforementioned unfitness for office, I'll have two links back to you within the day*. |
It's not black and white (article from a year ago)
https://www.vox.com/politics/358877/biden-age-debate-media-coverage
...
So did the media get this one wrong?
I know many readers would love an easy answer here, and I know many pundits are eager to provide one. But it’s just not that simple.
For starters, there’s no such thing as “the media” anymore. We live in a time of such complete and utter mass-media fragmentation that we each live in a media bubble of our own making. In mine, Biden might be a wise leader who is making America sane again after four years of Trump insanity; in yours, he might be a doddering old fool or a victim of “elder abuse,” as Fox hosts are now openly saying.
And even if you narrow the media-criticism conversation down to a handful of high-profile, down-the-middle national outlets, the record of how effectively Biden’s health was covered is complicated, just as aging is a complicated process. Baker, who co-bylined a new story on Tuesday titled “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome,” told me, “It’s very likely that things have progressed in recent weeks and months that make this a more acute story now.”
Throughout Biden’s years in office, reporters sought to avoid ageist stereotypes and respect the fact that Biden has a history of stuttering while also reporting on what they were observing. They also weighed his verbal gaffes and viral video blunders against his political victories. Baker and several other reporters wrote in the June 2023 “America’s Oldest President” story that Biden was, in truth, “somewhere between the partisan cartoon of an addled and easily manipulated fogy promoted by Republicans and the image spread by his staff of a president in aviator shades commanding the world stage and governing with vigor.”
So, about those Republicans. Fox News stars have been taking a victory lap this week, having spent years and countless segments portraying Biden as incompetent and incapacitated. They feel like they deserve credit for being early to the story that’s now consuming Washington.
But Fox supplied precious little actual reporting on the subject of Biden’s health. Instead, hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham queued up video clips of Biden looking helpless and played those clips on a loop, devoid of any context or balance. When Biden would deliver a forceful speech, as on State of the Union night, Fox’s commentators seemed caught off guard.
Consider the recent controversies over so-called “cheapfake” videos of Biden. He really has, at times, appeared to wander off and freeze up in front of cameras. But some of the videos hyped by Biden critics were misleading, even maliciously so.
Pro-Trump media outlets took a clip of Biden pausing before sitting down in a chair and claimed that there was no chair there at all. Online meme makers imagined that he was defecating during a D-Day ceremony.
Those types of lies caused at least a little bit of hesitation among good-faith reporters. As one said to me, “I didn’t want to feed into a bad-faith caricature.”
But the answer to bad-faith attacks can’t be a supine press, and journalists have a chance now to prove they’re up to the task of reporting this story. The public deserves to know more about Biden’s health, and it is owed more insight into how the president is functioning in the White House.
We live in the era of a gerontocracy. Were Trump to win, he’d be 82 at the end of his second term — older than Biden is now. “The Biden-is-old story is a small piece of a bigger story, which is that our entire government is really old, across all branches,” said Alter, who wrote the 2020 book The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.
That new generation is still waiting for its turn. So questions of age will come up over and over again. Reporters who push past hostile press offices and recalcitrant readers to get to the facts will have met the moment — and delivered to the public what it deserves.
Anyway, good riddance of Genocide Joe, hope he lives long enough to stand trial but I doubt it.
