"I'm the Problem; It's Me": On the Confession the Mainstream Media Won't Make
An unnamed source says that at an earlier point in time it was thought that a octogenarian might come to need to use a wheelchair at a future date, but the person in question has as of press time not reached that point, but continues to walk and bike, and the journalists reporting this allegation don't name the source. Someone thought a thing could've happened but it hasn't and we don't know quite who that someone is. Did that rock your world yet? It has rocked the world of mainstream media, which cooked up some hyperventilating headlines about the hypothetical about a politician no longer in office.
We in the USA are in deep trouble and a major reason for the trouble we're in is the mainstream media and their many persistent distortions of truth, fact, reality in service of their agendas and the limits of their worldview (and lack of resistance to intimidation by the right). That habit has contributed hugely to a misinformed electorate, which in turn contributes to the outcomes of elections. The msm have sins of omission (not covering or playing down important and impactful news, including out of deference to the right), sins of obsession (pumping up minor stories into manufactured scandal and drama), and sins of distortion ( many kinds of bias manifested in many ways).
These powerful corporate entities routinely pretend they have no actual influence but are somehow standing behind a glass partition just quietly observing what happened, so they takes no responsibility for outcome, even as they exhibit huge biases and overt agendas, up to and including major impact on American elections, which in turn do much to shape (or sabotage) the fate of the world. While right-wing media are regularly excoriated, mainstream media sabotage democracy and justice less obviously but, because of its broader audiences, more effectively.
Its players seem to play for each others' approval so they dogpile, build echo chambers, feed off each other, install filter bubbles and huddle behind confirmation biases. They collectively fabricate official versions of what happened that often diverge from the facts. Right now a prime example is contaminating the informational drinking water. It should be the dullest story ever, the smallest potatoes, the most nothing-scented nothingburger, but while the Trump Administration plays nice with autocrats in the middle east and terrorizes brown people who are undocumented, or here legally, or actually citizens, sabotages the global economy, and dismantles the federal government while trying to destroy all our rights and also the rule of law, media bigwigs Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios (but also a CNN pundit, because media inbreeding is a thing) are selling a book about Joe Biden with the pumped-up title Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Books take a long time to write, edit, proofread, lay out, print, and distribute, so they likely decided to work on this before the election – perhaps they were hoping to do some damage to a Harris administration, but they're distracting from a Trump Administration instead. In Christian theology, original sin is what Adam and Eve committed by disobeying God; in American history, slavery is often said to be this nation's original sin; but apparently in this book it's being old.
The New York Times, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, New York Magazine, and of course CNN and Axios have all featured stories in the last few days generally treating its contents as gospel, piling on its claims that key people cited in the book (which is not out yet, but apparently available to select sources) say aren't true. Political scientist and Atlantic contributor Norman Orenstein tweeted in a rare dissent, "I have a hard time watching journalists high five each other over books on WH covering up for Biden. A diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election. False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception."
In the present moment, many of them have glommed onto Tapper and Thompson's unnamed source's claim that someone said Biden might someday need a wheelchair and inflated it into a headline-grabbing scandal. They thereby conflate physical and cognitive decline, which is insulting to all the brilliant people of all ages who get around on wheels. We did once have a president who used a wheelchair, and he was the most powerful and effective president of the twentieth century and arguably the greatest. Franklin Delano Roosevelt served three terms and part of a fourth while mobility-impaired thanks to polio – you know, the terrible disease that almost disappeared in this country after 1955 because of a vaccine that Health and Human services secretary RFK Jr. would maybe like to withdraw.
The book also seems to be an example of the anonymous sources which bad journalism leans on heavily to further its agenda. You can pretty much find someone to say whatever you want, if they don't have to go on the record, and you can claim that someone is representative of something – the American people, say – but they're more likely to be representative of the journalist's agenda. Here in the screenshot below is Tapper last summer glomming onto an Axios anonymous source saying Democrats are resigned to defeat. (Tapper, incidentally, moderated the June debate in which Biden did so badly, as did Trump, but there are no standards to which Trump is held by the mainstream media.)
So far as I can tell, no one asked elected officials to go on the record about this resignation to defeat or saw fit to quote Senator Brian Schatz who responded on social media, "I have spoken to dozens of elected Democrats over the last few weeks and not one of us is resigned to anything." Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez declared, "If you’re a “senior Democrat” that feels this way, you should absolutely retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism." Anonymous defeatist source: greatly amplified. Prominent actual officials: ignored. Cherrypicking at its most problematic. Last summer, when Senator Richard Blumenthal said, “I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November, because it is an existential threat to the country if Donald Trump wins. Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee has my support,” MSNBC– and they're supposed to be the liberal wing of the msm--tweeted that Blumenthal said, “I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden," misrepresenting a senator to tear down a presidential candidate.
At least three prominent men assert that stuff in Original Sin they're supposed to have witnessed did not happen, which is a lot for a book that's not even out. Politico reports that "Longtime Biden aide Jake Sullivan pushed back on reporting in a new book that the president forgot his name," and posted a video of Sullivan doing so. Former Ambassador to Denmark Rufus Gifford says he was in the room where Biden, according to the book, didn't recognize George Clooney: “I was one of eight people in the room when this infamous moment happened. When I read this in the book, I was like, this never happened … That moment didn’t exist.” Even former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer says he believes Gifford, and says what Gifford says--that at these events introductions are performed of the "Mr. President, here's George" kind that preclude having to recall the person in question.
Former chair of the Democratic Party Jaime Harrison had a squabble on Twitter/X with an Axios editor who repeatedly contradicted Harrison when Harrison asserted an incident in the book concerning him never happened. As if Tapper and Thompson have more credibility than the (Black) person who was there. Though it's seldom acknowledged, Axios is a right-wing publication; the editor who argued with Harrison, Jake Wilkins, formerly worked for Republican senators. Of course the three who dispute the book's accounts are all loyal Democrats, but that's who was around Biden a lot. Meanwhile Tapper and Thompson are reported to have hired a crisis p.r. firm, perhaps because all this might blow up in their faces--or might not, because it serves their colleagues so well, and because accountability for men like them rarely comes, and when it does it tends to be gentle and short-lived.
The mainstream media are extremely fond of "what went wrong" stories that do not include themselves, and one argument for why this book was born is that it furthers that distraction and exoneration. This is a "it's Joe Biden's fault Donald Trump is president, and it's the Democratic Party's fault there was Joe Biden." Which also falls into the "she made him do it" frame I wrote an earlier Meditation about, since in normal times and places you'd think it was Trump, the Republican Party, and its donors and voters who are primarily to blame for Trump and his current rampage.
Jeet Heer, falling in with the frame, puts it this way: "Given the necessity of fighting Trump, there’s a temptation to say that the party doesn’t have time for potentially divisive internal wrangling." Doing the most urgent job on earth in this moment – countering horrific destruction – is here framed as a temptation, as if it came with beach chairs and fruity cocktails. I'd say that's a temptation that the party should maybe succumb to (but also why would all these pundits know if there is internal wrangling, because even elected officials sometimes discuss things privately). I'd like the party and everyone who doesn't like fascism, gulags, and the destruction of the planet to focus on opposing them. But the mainstream media is an obstacle to getting the job done, and is desperately in need of accountability and reform, even if self-awareness is too much to ask of them.
p.s. The title of this essay comes from Taylor Swift's anthem "Antihero,"
I'm the problem, it's me
At teatime, everybody agrees
I'll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror
which maybe came to mind because of this recent social media post by the leader of the formerly free world (and maybe references Trump staring directly at the sun while watching an eclipse):
p.p.s. I'm trying to make this a piece about the sins of the punditocracy, but the example before us is a questionable book about a former president and the amplification of its claims by its authors' colleagues. (It's not about other aspects of Biden's presidency, including his appalling support for the bombing of trapped civilians in Gaza.) So, for the record, Biden has a lifelong stutter, which though he has mastered it to some degree, seemed to come back to trip him up when he's tired or stressed, and he's got, according to his public medical reports, an imperfectly healed foot injury and spinal arthritis, which explain his unspringy gait; both those things were seized upon as signs of overall incapacity.
One of the outrages of last summer was how the New York Times tried to, in a big front page story on July 8, insinuate that Biden had Parkinson's disease, by making drama about the fact that Dr. Kevin R. Cannard, a neurologist, had visited the White House several times while Biden was president. The Times apparently picked up the idea of calling the neurologist a Parkinson's expert from the right-wing New York Post (which belongs to Rupert Murdoch, who did a lot to bring us Trump in 2016), skipped the fact that some of the doctor's visits took place when Biden was not in residence, and ran a subhead that said "The White House implied that the doctor’s visits were related to treating other people," as if the shifty White House was saying something that could not be confirmed.
Cannard had, in fact, served in a clinic for White House employees through multiple administrations dating back to 2012. That Parkinson's story was part of the New York Times's furious campaign to force Biden's resignation--192 stories in less than two weeks focusing on his abysmal June debate performance and age--in one of the most outrageous transgressions of journalistic norms I've witnessed. It was the New York Times that published George Clooney's attack on Biden that July, whose claims the book in question here pumps up and Ambassador Gifford contradicts. I'm not interested in relitigating Biden's anything, but I am interested in mapping how major news media, functioning as an unaccountable fourth branch of government, misuse their power in destructive ways.
p.p.p.s. Added after this went out as an email: the background to all this is deep fear and loathing toward the old and aging, which says a lot about those who harbor those (often unexamined) feelings, and not much about the aged. I know some who are at the top of their game in their eighties and nineties, and what's the Trump Administration but proof that a lot of shiny trim people in what's supposed to be their prime are bereft of all moral beauty and a lot of common sense?
