Mainstream Media Has a Double Standard on Slip-ups by Politicians not Named Biden
It’s easy for most of us to see the stark difference between President Biden and Donald Trump. For some reason, the mainstream press hasn’t been able to see it.
Last Thursday, DOJ Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report on the Joe Biden classified documents case. The report started by clearly stating that Biden had not broken the law when some classified documents were mishandled in his move out of the White House at the end of his term as Vice President.
That’s all we needed to know. A one page report like the one for Mike Pence’s case would seem adequate here too. But for some reason, Hur decided that a 300 page report containing all kinds of nonsense and immaterial information was in order. Hur’s handling of this case is judicial malpractice.
Heather Cox Richards (Feb 9, 2024) has an excellent write up on this. Here’s a quote. You can read the whole thing here if you would like.
As television host and former Republican representative from Florida Joe Scarborough put it: “He couldn’t indict Biden legally so he tried to indict Biden politically.”
How did the press handle it? No mention of Hur’s judicial malpractice. Instead, they obsessed about Biden’s age which Hur felt the need to elaborate on. The New York Times had five articles on it’s front page. CNN was reporting on this non stop. It’s almost as if the mainstream media wants Trump to win the presidential election this fall.
Biden was interviewed for over 5 hours and actually handled it quite well in spite of the interview starting on Oct. 8, 2023. You might remember that was the day after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. In the short time between the attack and his interview, Biden spent hours on the phone and in meetings dealing with the crisis at hand. I guess that the press didn’t notice.
Robert Hubbell (here’s a link) points out the following::
Within the 24-hour window of the NYTimes raking Biden over the coals, the following Republicans misspoke but the Times reacted with indifference:
“An hour after Biden says the President of Egypt is the President of Mexico Trump says the Prime Minister of Hungary, [Viktor Orban] is the President of Turkey”—a repeated mistake by Trump on the campaign trail.
Speaker Mike Johnson confused the countries of Iran and Israel in an interview on Fox News, saying that the US has already “funded Iran” in the existing US budget—a mistake viewed as slanderous by the tens of millions of citizens in both countries.
Fox News infotainer posing as a journalist Jesse Watters introduced South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as the “South Carolina Governor.”
Daniel Goldman ABC News interview: You can watch the interview here via X/Twitter.
To the media, it's apparently okay when @SpeakerJohnson confuses Israel and Iran but not when @POTUS makes a minor incidental mistake. POTUS’ age gives him valuable wisdom and experience, as we’ve seen in how he’s handled Ukraine & the Middle East. The media needs to be better.
Cox Richards also mentioned in her substack post (link above) that the Biden-Harris campaign released a statement pointing out that within an hour of the release of the Hur report, Trump made a campaign speech in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where he “lied more than two dozen time, slurred his words, confused basic facts, and …” You won’t hear any of that in the mainstream news.
In spite of all this nonsense, I'm still optimistic that we will win big in November. Biden is a good president. We are far better off today than when he became president. The Democratic party is strong and we’re on a winning streak. We won big in 2018, 2020 and 2022. We won every election in 2023.
We have thousands of pro democracy organizations today that didn’t exist in 2016 when a lot of us woke up to the need to defend our precious democracy from the threat of MAGA and Trump.
There are millions of energized grassroot activists who are canvassing door to door, writing postcards, textbanking, donating to campaigns, writing letters to the editor, phone banking, organizing and networking. They have Trump. They also have a candidate quality problem that continues to get worse and worse.
We can do this. They can do the crazy, if we do the work we will win bigtime in November.
This is one of my favorite photos. It is a picture of Bonifacio, Corsica, France that I took in 1976.