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The Wages of the Media’s Big Lie of 2024
In a year filled with media misses, the biggest collective lie of all not only cost Democrats the election but may have permanently reshaped the landscape of journalism in America.
The Wall Street Journal has recently released a series of reports about how President Joe Biden was essentially incapable of carrying out the duties of his office from the day he stepped into the Oval Office.
What the Wall Street Journal is doing is less real-time journalism, and more like investigative history.
One wonders whether the Biden White House was a Woodrow and Edith Wilson situation—where the first lady essentially operated as the unelected, unofficial president in her mentally incapacitated husband’s place—or was ruled by a Barack Obama shadow president, or perhaps the executive branch was wholly controlled by bureaucrats and woke interest groups. The answer is probably some combination of these things.
Maybe the Wall Street Journal’s reporting will finally sort this out.
The fact is that Biden’s mental decline has been blatantly obvious for years. The legacy media was wholly uninterested and unwilling to do any kind of digging to reveal the depth of the president’s decline to the public.
Biden transformed his basement campaign into a closet presidency. Despite having a fawning media in his corner, he rarely made public appearances. Those he did make seemed to be tightly controlled. The aging president’s demeanor suggested that he was suffering through some form of age-related dementia, and certainly memory loss.
Sure, maybe Biden blurting out things like “God save the queen” randomly at speaking engagements could be written off as an eccentricity, but the number of times Biden seemed completely out of it in public from day one was hard to miss.
Nevertheless, the media persisted in their Pravda-esque coverup, which only escalated in 2024 as the presidential campaign season began.
This big lie about Biden’s health not only put the country at risk, it also heavily contributed to their worst nightmare of Donald Trump marching back triumphantly into the White House with electoral and cultural headwinds in his favor.
Given that many Americans had concerns about Biden’s mental state even as he ran for president in 2020, it should have been a media priority to dig into whether the criticism was true or not. The only thing they ever seemed to be interested in is acting like Biden administration PR managers, desperately trying to “contextualize” every worrying sign that the president wasn’t all there.
But as I argued again and again, gaslighting the public about Biden’s mental decline was ultimately a disastrous and losing proposition. It only “worked” because the Left had such enormous institutional power.
It didn’t take special medical expertise to know that Biden wasn’t in good shape. The influence of social media platforms like X, fully controlled by the Left in 2020 but now in the hands of Elon Musk, ensured that the world would see example after example of the president not being all there.
No amount of Associated Press fact checks or Joe Scarborough pleadings that Biden was sharper than ever could convince the vast majority of Americans that the president was A-OK.
And what really makes the media coverup of Biden’s condition even more interesting and disastrous from my perspective is that very early in the campaign cycle they had a chance to reset and salvage their reputation somewhat.
When special counsel Robert Hur released his report about Biden’s handling of classified documents, that was the media’s opportunity to bail out.
Hur reported that Biden broke the law, but was a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He clearly meant to exonerate the president by saying that he was mentally too far gone to be held accountable for his actions. The media should have jumped on the opportunity to make Biden a sympathetic rather than corrupt character.
They could have started uncovering stories about his health that might have led to him dropping out of the race much sooner.
But they couldn’t quite do it. They instead continued with the White House message that the president was fine and that any suggestion of Biden’s decline was no more than a vast, right-wing conspiracy. It was a bridge too far for the public.
The media kept up that charade until Biden’s catastrophic first debate with Trump, which has to go down as one of the worst performances in the history of televised debates. The whole world saw the truth and couldn’t unsee it.
It was all over from there. The game was up. The only “journalists” who could keep up with the lie were those who were so partisan, delusional, and simple-minded that they couldn’t drop the bit.
Those in the media with a room temperature IQ began the miserable task of pretending that they had been deceived by the White House or that they always had concerns about Biden’s health (but did nothing about it). They continue to try rewriting the past to make it seem like not covering Biden’s decline was just a little misstep and mostly the fault of Biden’s no-good staff who managed him.
Jan Crawford: Most under-reported story “would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable.” Duck chasing meme: WHY WAS IT UNDER-REPORTED? pic.twitter.com/nkgu6lcEzN— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) December 29, 2024
This is clearly the message all the legacy media networks are going with.
Once again, CNN's Abby Phillip scrambles out of a discussion of the media's refusal to cover Biden's cognitive decline pic.twitter.com/MWWPj1ICXN— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) December 31, 2024
So, one has to ask: What did the media get for all this gaslighting?
What it got was the complete public disintegration of confidence in media institutions that have dominated for more than half a century. When Biden dropped out—or was forced out—of the race, they desperately tried to convince the American people that the president no longer existed, and that Vice President Kamala Harris was bringing Hope and Change 2.0 to the White House.
Americans didn’t buy it and almost literally every single demographic in the country shifted right. And perhaps most catastrophically of all, the locus of media power shifted radically toward “alternative” media. Platforms like X and podcasts like “The Joe Rogan Experience” are the mainstream media now. Corporate media power has utterly disintegrated.
This monumental media distortion, years and even decades in the making from a media ecosystem that became arrogant and delusional about their grip on public opinion, toppled the whole crumbling edifice. Rarely has a fall from grace and power been so justly deserved.
The post The Wages of the Media’s Big Lie of 2024 appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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