July 7, 2024

BEN SHAPIRO: How Biden’s bad debate exposed the legacy media.

Before 2008, the legacy media — while always leaning to the political left — had maintained a patina of objectivity. When Bill Clinton lied to the American people about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, they belatedly pounced. When John Kerry’s campaign began to crater, they reluctantly covered it. They were, to be sure, oriented against Republican candidates and policies. But they recognized that their credibility innately relied on the public’s perception that they could put their own biases aside long enough to report accurately even on those with whom they agreed.

Public trust in the media had been in a steady state of decline since the late 1990s — according to Gallup, 53 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media in 1997; in 2007, that number was 47 percent.

Then came Barack Obama. In 2008, the media, in its insistence that Barack Obama was a philosopher-king, decided to adhere to his version of the facts at every available instance. They ignored or downplayed stories that hurt Obama. They insisted that his biggest scandal was the wearing of a beige suit. Obama was simply too godlike a figure for them to resist. They became, for all intents and purposes, extensions of the Democratic White House. And public trust began to crater. In 2008, those who trusted the media dropped to 43 percent. In 2016, with the media’s abominable coverage of the Trump-Hillary race, the number dropped to 32 percent. It recovered slightly over the next five, but then began cratering again: to just 36 percent in 2021, 34 percent in 2022, 32 percent in 2023.

A consistent pattern of partisan coverage ate away at the media’s credibility, slowly and steadily.

Then came Joe Biden’s debate collapse last week. And now, all media credibility is gone.

Ernest Hemingway once described the process of going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The same is true of legacy media legitimacy. Legacy media lost the trust of the American people with its coverage of Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, Covid, transgenderism and the Hunter Biden laptop story. But they maintained some semblance of credibility by appealing to “new studies,” the “fog of war,” the difficulty of reporting an ever-evolving set of facts. When their lies were debunked and they were exposed they could simply claim they were just reporting based on the information they had at the time. They were just doing the hard work of Journalisming™ — just trusting the experts, who always slanted their political direction — and could continue congratulating each other for their brave and important work. Then came the Biden presidency.

Either Biden is senile or he is not. And it does not take an expert in Russian relations, systemic racism or Covid biology to tell the answer to that question. Any child could do it.

There’s no doubt that the DNC-MSM creation of Obama was a watershed moment, as this John McCain ad from 2008 highlights:

But the media tried out their template four years earlier with John Kerry, but he was far too stiff a candidate for it to work:

As the Anchoress perceptively noted, 2004 was in many ways the MSM’s template for “reporting” on the 2008 election — only this time around they had a much charismatic candidate to build their campaign around. When Obama had his own Winter Soldier moment — the moment that the Rev. Wright videos hit YouTube — the self-described “non-official campaign” staffers working in the media and coordinating via the JournoList were prepared to both bottle up the conservation, and to smear conservatives as racists — “[T]ake one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?” as Spencer Ackerman infamously banged into his keyboard  — and use Obama’s race to deflect criticism. (As with Kerry’s Winter Soldier phase, Obama would have his own radical chic connection, thanks to his friendship with Bill Ayers. And note how badly even  a stalwart Ruling Class Democrat like George Stephanopoulos was briefly demonized by the far left for even broaching the issue.)

Flash-forward to the present day, and twenty years of full-on gaslighting later. At the NRO Corner, Jeffrey Blehar writes: The Media Want the Flaming Wreckage of the Biden Campaign to Explode — to Cover Their Tracks.

With each additional piece — each “Now It Can Be Told!” preface, each additional scandalous detail about Biden being non compos mentis — my blood begins to curdle. Oh, the sudden enthusiasm with which the media is now reporting on this! And why now? Because it can no longer be hidden! If Biden had succeeded somehow in hiding it — or had he declined to debate altogether, as most observers expected him to before he (surprisingly) agreed to an early debate — then it is undeniably true that none of these pieces would be written now. Did we experience an orgy of self-recriminative “make up” reporting about the implosion of the Russiagate hoax? Or about Hunter Biden’s laptop being authentic? How about Covid likely being a Chinese lab leak? Of course not — no apology was necessary in the media’s mind because those were no longer “live” issues, and their suppression of the truth had served its necessary purpose. This time the ruse was exposed before the con had been completed. Now the only job: Get a new shyster in to run at the top of the ticket and complete the mission.

It’s easy to get lost in bleak humor (or score-settling) and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of what it is we are living through: The president of the United States is an empty shell of himself mentally. His praetorian guard has been keeping his near-complete mental collapse a secret for possibly years now, and the media engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” (Nuzzi’s words, not mine) to conceal it from voters, out of reflexive (in the truest sense of the word) partisan and professional self-interest. Very Smart People tell me that my sense of complete betrayal and abiding disgust is a feeling peculiar only to Republicans and political anoraks — chumps who care too much, in other words. Perhaps so.

But the question Charlie Cooke posed last week should be the same one you hang on to as well: If the media claims it has been lied to about the state of Biden’s health for all these long years, then maybe they should investigate that? How that happened? How much did Kamala Harris — Biden’s almost certain replacement, should he step down — know? When did she know it? A real media would start from the premise that she is just as disqualified by helping to conceal Biden’s collapse as Biden and his people themselves are, and force her to prove otherwise. A real media wouldn’t play a balancing game in its head, saying, “Let’s not push her too hard, we don’t want to help the Other Guy.” This is not a real media, however, so I will invoke Betteridge’s Law by answering the question Charlie merely posed in his headline: Will the media seriously investigate how they were “misled” about Biden’s health? No. That would mean investigating themselves.

I hope the Faustian bargain was worth for them; Brian Stelter’s career implosion is particularly ignominious: Media Was DUPED! Jarvis and Brian Stelter Back-and-Forth the FUNNIEST Damn Thing You’ll Read Today.

 

Posted at 12:29 pm by Ed Driscoll