Narrative Shift: The Press And Joe Biden
In the week leading up to midterms, multiple articles that paint President Biden and his administration in a negative light have appeared across the spectrum of journalistic bias. Why?
The days leading up to an election are absolutely critical from a strategic standpoint. Nothing is done or said without considering the potential impact on voters. Timing is everything, after all, so considering the Democrats’ desperation to cling to power in the face of high crime, the worst inflation in decades, and a slew of troubling economic indicators, the shift towards more negative coverage of the President is particularly interesting.
On November 1st, The Hill, which is considered to be relatively unbiased in their news coverage, ran an op-ed by Merrill Matthews titled “Is a 25th Amendment removal in Joe Biden’s future?” which details the process by which a President could be removed from office. He does not go into specifics as to why Biden could be a candidate for removal other than mentioning his tendency to wander off and appear lost after speeches. In this case, listing the many gaffs and blatant lies uttered by the 46th President is unnecessary: the signs of his cognitive decline are hard to deny.
One day later, Aaron Kliegman for Just The News wrote “President Biden’s latest public gaffes are reigniting long-held concerns about his cognitive acuity and mental fitness for the highest office in the land.” Granted, coming from this source such criticisms are not unexpected. Just the News is considered to be a ‘Questionable Source,’ primarily due to its coverage related to COVID and election fraud. I’ll let you make your own judgement there. But the fact that Kliegman’s story comes on the heels of a similar piece in a mainstream ‘respectable’ source gives the argument more weight.
The mainstream media usually runs cover for the Democrats, but after Twitter fact-checked a White House tweet, The New York Post – considered right of center in reporting bias primarily because they publish stories the rest of the MSM wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole – ran an article pointing out that by deleting that tweet, the White House likely ran afoul of the Presidential Records Act, the same act used as justification for the Mar-a-Lago raid earlier this year. By highlighting the hypocrisy of the federal government they also ensured that the deleted tweet and fact-check would live forever and continue to reach new people.
One day later, CNN’s fact-checking arm, Facts First, released an article which read “Fact Check: Biden’s midterm message includes false and misleading claims.” It is undeniable that CNN has a strong Left-leaning bias. This article, released at 9:00 AM (EST) on Saturday, just days before the elections, indicates that something is happening behind the scenes. Attempts to keep negative coverage out of the media are commonplace, so CNN’s choice to run this article at such a crucial time is very telling. The fact-checks wielded against Biden’s speech include debunking his statements on social security increases, his new corporate tax, statements on national debt and deficit, the unemployment rate, Biden’s student debt policy, gas prices, his relationship with Xi Jinping, and his claim that Trump’s tax cuts only helped the top 1%.
And then, just one day before the elections, published at 3:00am EST, the Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave Biden “A Bottomless Pinocchio.” This label is given specifically for Biden’s statements on his relationship with Xi, a claim he continues to repeat even though it is completely baseless. The article goes on to briefly touch on some of the same economic topics as the CNN piece had the previous day, but the most interesting part in this is actually the very first two sentences. “President Biden is a self-described ‘gaffe machine.’ That’s no excuse, of course, for a president making false or misleading statements.” Naturally, the Left-leaning Washington Post couldn’t resist mentioning Trump and their extensive fact-checking and Pinocchio-ing to soften the blow and remind readers that even if Biden is repeatedly caught fabricating aspects of his past and misrepresenting the current state of our economy, Trump was worse.
Even so, the timing is the important part here. These articles do not appear in a vacuum. They are assigned and approved by a range of people at each of these publications, many of whom have Left-leaning bias. If these narratives violated the press’s marching orders, they would assuredly never see the light of day. This is even more true during election season. As Project Veritas revealed in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections, the media colludes to push the candidates they want and smear the ones they don’t.
Which begs the question- why now? Could it be that they are strategically admitting to Biden’s cognitive decline and tendency to lie at the podium in order to appear more trustworthy and give their coverage of the midterm candidates some legitimacy? Or is there a mutiny in progress? Has the Biden administration become so irredeemable that their very own propaganda machine is starting to turn on them? Or perhaps the writing is on the wall and the media is preemptively putting some distance between themselves and the inevitably terrible track record of this administration.
Granted, Biden was persona non grata on the campaign trail, a point made by the striking lack of endorsements or campaigning he participated in, so distance between him and the most pivotal and contentious races may be strategically expedient. But even so, it seems like something has changed between the press and the President.
Keep an eye on it.
