Many in the media are trying to claim that the press was merely duped by Biden’s White House about the former president’s cognitive decline.
That simply isn’t true. The media actively took part in the coverup.
Don’t let them forget. I’ve got screenshots. ⤵️
I’ve done a number of threads on this but putting some of the most egregious stuff in one place.
Perhaps the most damming: Two weeks before the debate made Biden’s cognitive decline inescapable, @washingtonpost gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to allegedly edited videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” — all to defend Biden against criticisms about his age and well-being.
That story came four days after a previous effort from @washingtonpost to write off these videos as Republican efforts to mislead voters: proof, the Post claimed, that “the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters edge.”
To put a point on it: how can anyone claim that parroting the White House’s claims that real videos were “conspiracy theories” anything but an active cover up?
This isn’t about innocent objections. This is partisan hatchetry.
And these efforts go back months before that flurry.
When Special Counsel Hur put out a report revealing Biden’s cognitive issues, the @washingtonpost equated Biden forgetting the year his son died to anyone mixing up a name.
Again: this isn’t journalism. This is evasive PR.
And it wasn’t just the Post. @AP used the same exact framing to pretend the mental undoing of the guy with the nuclear codes was no big deal.
Not to be outdone, @CNN quoted an “assistant professor of communication sciences” to make the point that these slips “do not necessarily indicate a broader problem.”
Again, this isn’t reporting. This is obfuscation aimed at defending a political candidate.
Really. “The experts” said it was nothing to worry about. @NBCNews
We got rabid hand waiving from @nytimes. We needed medical experts to prove the evidence of our lying eyes that Biden was on the decline.
That was true for @nytimes in June, too. The week after the Post’s cheap fakes take, the Times lamented “the distorted, online version” of Biden promoted by conservatives, “a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.”
What if — stay with me here — those concerns were right?
In coverage that would make Stalin blush, @nytimes published a piece back when concerns about Biden’s age were just starting, promoting his remaining “sharp and commanding in private” and his having “exhibited striking stamina” that even his young staff couldn’t match.
Really.
This headline and subhead from @nytimes presented without comment.
Nearly the entire media universe rushed to repeat these same claims — initially a concoction of the White House — to prop up Biden as the election approaches.
Here’s @ABC @NBCNews @CBSNews and @thehill
Some are worth calling out. Obligatory @MSNBC and Joy Reid mention.
This @AP side by side really captures what’s wrong with the corporate press.
And don’t forget, even as Biden was coming unmoored at the debate, the press were still trying to run interference for him.
@axios sent out an emergency tweet: “🚨 Biden has a cold.”
@CBSNews confirmed Biden had a cold. @NBCNews did too. Don’t worry guys. Just a cold! @KellyO
All the while, stories of how bad Biden’s cognitive decline was were waiting for the writing.
As the media was playing defense, White House guests were witnessing “troubling” signs.
@ABC, for surely innocent reasons, reported that fact a month later.
You aren’t imagining it. @TheWrap really did blame this all on Biden’s stutter.
I reported on this media conspiracy in progress back in February 2023 for @FreeBeacon.
So, no. I won’t let the press memoryhole this shameful turn.
Yes, the Biden White House lied about his cognitive decline. But the press played an active role in carrying that lie to the American people, in the lead up to an election.
They can’t walk it back now.
I think that means people of good faith need to keep bringing it up.
I had the chance to host the @AmerCompass Podcast last week, and naturally wanted to do so.
@AmerCompass @MarkHalperin @Holden_Court And as ever, if you’d like to kick me a couple bucks to keep tabs on the media, I’ve got a tip jar. paypal.com/donate/?busine…
@AmerCompass @MarkHalperin @Holden_Court I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the biggest media story of Biden’s term is how the corporate press took part in the coverup of his cognitive decline, in an effort to support Biden in a presumed election against Trump.
It is beyond shameful. And we can’t forget it.
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The coverage of the anti-ICE riots in LA is perhaps the clearest example of advocacy “journalism” in Trump’s second term.
Reading the reporting, you would never know the most significant fact: the American people support Trump’s deportations.
Follow along ⤵️
First, the facts about the riots.
You’ve seen the burning cars, looting & clashes between police & protestors.
Demonstrators blocked the freeway, attacked ICE agents, all in an effort to prevent the deportations of illegal aliens. Trump deployed troops to allow ICE to operate.
As @MarkHalperin and @seanspicer discussed, the situation in LA is so tranquil that the mayor has instituted a curfew for the city.
The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.
The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?
But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.
Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.
Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)
It should go without saying, but the media cultivating this type of baseless hysteria about an admin for partisan reasons is much more of a threat to the underpinnings of our democracy than anything Trump has actually done.
Quick 🧵⤵️
A couple quotes:
“If you think that there’s this thing out there called America, and it’s exceptional, that means you don’t have to do anything” to stop fascism.
What? What does that even mean??
That if you, like millions of Americans!, believe in American exceptionalism…you’re a fascist?
Really?
“The powers that be can do whatever they want to you”
Trump can’t even deport people who have deportation orders against them without a federal judge stepping in.
I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.
Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so.
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.
They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented.