Thread by @DrewHolden360

🧵THREAD🧵

There’s media bias, and then there’s a press actively pushing government propaganda because the president told them to.

Today we saw perhaps the most egregious recent example of the latter. Follow along ⤵️
@FreeBeacon
freebeacon.com/media/biden-im…

Yesterday the White House sent out a memo to heads of major media organizations telling them to more aggressively defend the president as he faces impeachment.

Rather than be insulted that the president would presume to use the American press as his mouthpiece, the media largely obliged.

Just look at this from @CNN.

And it wasn’t just CNN of course.

Here’s @NBCNews doing the same thing.

The “thought bubble” from @axios is basically a summation of the Biden admin’s talking points from the memo.

And @politico wasn’t much better.

This comes as outlets are already parroting Biden’s talking points about the impeachment more broadly.

The media keep repeating that there’s “no evidence” connecting Hunter and Joe Biden, as @ap does here.

@TIME did the same thing.

All these claims were made despite the evidence already presented. @mirandadevine summarized it eloquently in her piece about the memo today: nypost.com/2023/09/13/med…

After the memo was sent, @NewsHour had the guy who sent it on! The guy who had just told the media how to do their jobs. Unbelievable.

A few journalists did push back. Credit to @Ingrid_Jacques and @KimberlyEAtkins for doing so in the (conceptual) pages of mainstream outlets.

One tidbit I can’t get over — @CNN has seemingly changed its tune on whether an impeachment amounts to an “attempt to effectively reverse a democratic election” … something tells me they wouldn’t have said that about the last one.

I cover the press, so I’m not gonna wax poetic about how they’re immune to political pressure. But this has to be the worst capitulation to a politician for nakedly political reasons that I’ve ever seen.

And they have no shame about doing it.

The White House told the press to jump, and their response was “how high?” Just a shameful showing from the people who are supposed to hold the government to account.

A couple more because this is really egregious behavior.

The White House pressures outlets including @CNN to be even more skeptical of impeachment. @AnnieGrayerCNN, @MarshallCohen and @ddale8 are out with a fact check mere hours later.

@CNN @AnnieGrayerCNN @MarshallCohen @ddale8 Another from @AP - “no significant evidence” is simply not true (see above) and also the point of an impeachment — to have the power to gather all the evidence.

@CNN @AnnieGrayerCNN @MarshallCohen @ddale8 @AP @NewsHour did the same thing.

These are campaign talking points. It isn’t journalism.

@CNN @AnnieGrayerCNN @MarshallCohen @ddale8 @AP @NewsHour And it even went international. @BBCNews