Yes, There Was A Media Scandal In 2024. No, It Wasn't About Joe Biden

[tulipsandroses]

Like I said in another post earlier. Some in the media are complicit for this disaster we find ourselves in

The political press corps started ‘normalizing’ Trump just weeks after Jan. 6, 2021, to get access. That’s a big reason Trump later won, not some ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s age.

WASHINGTON — Early on in Donald Trump’s first term, a favorite riposte from right-wing accounts on social media to real and perceived cultural excesses from “The Left” was simply: “This is how we got Trump.”
Eight years later, we’re getting another round of this same clever retort, only this time the culprits are not progressive activists, but reporters who covered the Joe Biden White House. Apparently, we collectively conspired with Biden family members and aides to hide his worsening physical and mental condition from America. It’s an amazing assertion, given that polls in early 2024 found that some 80% of Americans thought that Biden was too old to be president. Focus group participants said they were shocked he was even running again. It turns out that people drew their own conclusions from watching his halting public speeches and videos of his increasingly noticeable old-man’s shuffle.

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The great irony is that there absolutely was malfeasance by the media in its coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign — not in how it covered the sitting president, but in how it covered the challenger.
Donald Trump assaulted the Constitution he had sworn to defend after he lost reelection in 2020. He invited his followers to Washington long after the votes had been counted, whipped them up into an angry mob and then sicced them on his own vice president and Congress to coerce them into awarding him a second term.
It was the closest America has come to losing our democracy since the first year of the Civil War. Yet within weeks of Jan. 6, 2021, reporters began making the trek to Mar-a-Lago to interview him and somehow managed to file stories that elided the day entirely. I recall listening to a podcast interview with one who was asked how Trump had explained his behavior on Jan. 6, and the reporter replied that the topic had not come up.
I was and remain dumbfounded by that. As a young reporter, I used to cover criminals full time. The idea of agreeing to a jailhouse interview of a suspect with the understanding that I would not detail the charges against him in the story never would have occurred to me. Even if it had, my editors never would have tolerated such an arrangement.

And yet by late spring 2022, that is precisely what started happening. The political press corps began normalizing the hell out of Donald Trump. They downplayed or flat-out ignored the fundamental violence he had committed against our democracy in their coverage in return for the possibility of an interview or even just anonymous quotes from top advisers.
(Because, really, what kind of reporter are you if you can’t publish a few hours ahead of time whether Trump is going to call Gov. Ron DeSantis “Meatball Ron” or “Fat Ron” in his rally speech?) Just as one example: Trump, unlike every other modern presidential nominee, refused to take a traveling press pool with him. Instead, he and his staff handpicked reporters for each trip. You can probably guess which reporters were invited and which ones weren’t.
There was an implicit understanding that access to the Republican nominee meant you would not portray him as a fundamental, proven threat to American democracy. Which, of course, he was back then, and which he continues to prove himself to be now on a near-daily basis.

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While it’s absolutely correct that he had become terrible at the public performance part of the job — although he was never really good at that — there seems to be little evidence that his age affected his ability to analyze facts and make sound choices. (That part- chump is all about performance, no substance. )

[UTUSN]

1. Has TAPPER heard about this?!

[Hornedfrog2000]

2. Tapper is a grifter

They just do what they are told. They believe they are being impartial. Its a coping mechanism, because cnn puts multimillionaire news actors on tv to pretend to tell the news.