This OpEd ran in today’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
We need media that provide unbiased reporting of the news. And the press like to market themselves as that Fourth Estate. Two classic examples of their acting in that role are the investigations of Nixon’s Watergate activities and Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA. However, the media has a lurid history of covering up for the candidates they support.
Woodrow Wilson had suffered a severe stroke and was incapacitated during the final 17 months in office. His wife, Edith, ran the country, and the press concealed it. Similarly, the press covered up Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s serious health problems from 1940 onward as well as his series of adulterous relationships while in office.
President John F. Kennedy was a serial adulterer. According to biographer Robert Dallek, Kennedy believed that his friendly relationship with members of the press would help protect him from public revelations about his sex life. It worked. If you are young, charming, intelligent, handsome, articulate, and liberal, the media will wink at anything, including Obama dropping 26,171 bombs on seven different countries during his last year in office.
Compare these to the democratic media’s treatment of candidates it does not support. It will grasp at straws, claiming that Ronald Reagan was unsuited for reelection in 1984 because of his age. He was 69. Joe Biden is 78.
Reagan addressed those concerns head-on. He vowed to resign from office if he was ever found mentally unfit by White House doctors. Yet, democrats continued to exploit concerns about Reagan’s age. Tony Coelho, then-chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said “The age issue is in the campaign now.” During a now-famous debate, Reagan turned around and cut Walter F. Mondale off at the ankles, saying “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
But oh, how the media hated Reagan and would do anything to take him down. When did you hear any of the three-by-threes (CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/etc.) speculate that Biden should not be elected because of his age?
And while the media hid liberal presidents’ adulterous relationships, they paraded Trump’s affairs non-stop. And if Trump made a blunder during a speech or stumbled while walking, it was paraded as a sign of his being unfit for office. Not so with President Biden. The media report that it was the wind that made him fall three times in a row. His eye fills with blood during a CNN town hall event, but the media declare nothing to worry about, even after his brain aneurism.
Recently, Biden forgot the name of the Pentagon and of his Secretary of Defense, bizarrely referring to him as the “guy who runs that outfit over there.” Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA officer who recently announced he was leaving the Democratic Party, wrote: “This is why we have the 25th Amendment.”
Tom Elliott on Twitter: “Whoops: Biden forgets the name of the Pentagon, as well as the name of his secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin pic.twitter.com/ZtcgHLBIAO / Twitter”
Whoops: Biden forgets the name of the Pentagon, as well as the name of his secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin pic.twitter.com/ZtcgHLBIAO
Can you even imagine the media’s reaction if that had happened to Reagan or Trump? It would have been an immediate call for impeachment and executing the 25th Amendment. Instead, we’re assured that those are normal solecisms.
Last Thursday, Biden finally gave the first press conference of his presidency. It was the longest that a president has waited to give a press conference in over a century, and there is a good reason for that. Physically, he looks terrible, like photos of infirm Wilson and FDR at the ends of their presidencies. Aside from his weak physical appearance, it is obvious to any non-partisan that Biden is in severe cognitive decline. He needed a binder of notes in front of him to get through each sentence. At least three times during the press conference we witnessed Biden losing his train of thought and being unable to finish his sentences.
The establishment media are intentionally hiding these facts because they support Biden’s radical agenda, and the public knows it. According to a survey conducted by the global communications firm Edelman, media trust has hit an all-time low of 46%. The survey found that 58% of Americans (not Trump supporters) think “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.” And 56% believe the media is “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Because the media promote their agenda over factual news reporting, they have destroyed the much-needed Fourth Estate and given rise to what is being called the Fifth Estate: news via dubious entertainment sources like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, podcasts, late night comedians, and The View. The sad result of individualized news via social media is the creation of news sources made in our own image, which is just as disastrous as our current predicament.
