Why was it a surprise? Biden’s debate problems leave some wondering if the press missed the story
Why was it a surprise? Biden’s debate problems leave some wondering if the press missed the story
Did the media covering President Biden miss a story that was right in front of them? That's a question being asked in the wake of the president's halting debate performance in the debate with Donald Trump last week.
Easy question really; the press is no longer a check on our government, it's largely there to pump out propaganda and studiously ignore anything that threatens the power of the elites classes.
60I get this, and there are a lot of places pumping out low quality garbage that they just don’t care about.
That being said, staying alive as a news business in 2024 seems extremely difficult. Google + Facebook have fucked around with your business model for a decade, stealing clicks away and aggregating titles and pages (like with AMP). And now AI’s going to fuck everything up, and could fundamentally change how we receive our information.
I do empathize with people trying to report on what’s occurring in the world having to deal with all these larger struggles impacting their occupation.
8
Remember when that rat fuck Mitch McConnell froze up twice in stage?
45Yeah...
I said it made him unfit for office.
I thought I posted an article about it back then too, but I was thinking about this other time I was for holding people to a higher standard.
Edit:
https://lemmy.world/post/5526664?scrollToComments=true
We can't excuse shit from our own politicians, just because Republicans excuse it from theirs.
I stand by what I said 10 months ago in that thread when someone besides Biden displayed the same symptoms:
This didn’t happen overnight, if it’s this bad now then her judgement has been compromised for a long time.
We need term limits, because once these (completely normal) mental changes start happening, the person will almost always react with aggression and refuse to ever step down.
21
Yeah they missed how everything Trump said was so unhinged he sounded like he hasn't even been living on this planet. Also, what are "black jobs", Mr Trump?
21I'm not from the US, but I think senile alright guy is better than senile sumo hitler and the free press probably thought that as well.
8The media didn't miss a story, they actively colluded to hide it. Anyone pointing out Biden's decline was a Fox news watching conspiracy theorist, or it was a deep fake.
5When "moderates" say there no time to question if Biden is up to it.
Remember theyve literally been saying it for a fucking year now.
Nearly a year ago, in August 2023, the Associated Press-NORC poll found that three-quarters of U.S. adults said that the 81-year-old Biden was too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president. AP-NORC found this February that six in 10 adults were “not very” or “not at all” confident that Biden had the mental capability to serve as president, although the sentiment was roughly the same for his 78-year-old Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
When they say they just found out too, remember they've literally been hiding him from the public, literally a tenth of the the news conferences as the last D president.
The 36 news conferences he had given through June 30 were fewer than any president in the same time frame since Ronald Reagan, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. Biden gave a total of 128 interviews, compared to Donald Trump’s 369 at the same stage of his presidency and 497 by Biden’s former boss, she said.
4It's almost like the billionaire-owned media was busy manufacturing consent and it was going somewhat well for some time.
I mean Biden has had a series of the senility moments caught on tape, but before the presidential debate the billionaire-owned media successfully manufactured consent by telling the voters to ignore their lying eyes. Not all the senior moments were equally bad, so plenty of plausible sounding excuses were generated.
After the presidential debate the reality of Biden's condition was so blatantly exposed, the consent-making machine panicked and started furiously backtracking.
This situation isn't a joke because a lot of the billionaires will be negatively affected once Trump becomes King in November. With his King powers Trump can make CNN and MSNBC cease to exist. CNN and MSNBC don't give two hoots about journalism or about holding power to account (they'd have to hold their own billionaire owners to account then), but they do care massively about their own safety. They are scared now because they no longer believe Biden has a chance.
And all this insanity happened because none of the players in this story trust the democratic process. None of them trust the American people. None of the involved players respect the voters. They all believe they know what's best for us.
If we had a real open and democratic primary none of this would be happening.
-1
The press didn't miss it, they ignored it. Questions about his age have been dismissed or rejected since 2020, as though it'd somehow inappropriate to question the ability of an 80 year old to lead country. They never questioned why the President was doing so few unscripted appearances, or acknowledged some of his confused comments in press conferences. The pundit class even accused Jon Stewart of helping Trump for talking about this a few months ago.
Now that the entire country watched him have a 90 minute senior moment, the press is finally forced to give his fitness the scrutiny it deserves. And the worst part is that liberals are have convinced themselves that the problem isn't that the media never asked these questions, but that they've finally started asking these questions.
3This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, told the website Semafor this week.
Throughout the campaign, Biden aides have pushed back aggressively on the notion that he had become diminished, and some supporters are angered by any attention the issue gets in comparison to stories about whether or not Trump tells the truth.
Four reporters from the Times collaborated on a story, published Tuesday, that said several people who had encountered Biden behind closed doors noticed “he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.”
The 36 news conferences he had given through June 30 were fewer than any president in the same time frame since Ronald Reagan, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project.
Yet because the story, in a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, prominently quoted Republican House speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, it was dismissed by many at the time as being inspired by partisanship.
“What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steadfast, fact-based reporting on the subject that began a couple of years ago as we documented Biden’s age-related challenges in multiple, industry-leading articles,” Kahn wrote.
The original article contains 1,131 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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