The public immolation of President Joe Biden’s personal credibility shoves the media apparatus that propelled him to power into a tough jam.
In the past two weeks, everything that was obvious to close observers for the past three years is now in the open: he’s infirm, he’s unfit, he’s unwell.
It comes as a surprise only to those millions of Americans who trusted the liberal legacy media — the latter being a cohort that by and large hates those millions’ way of life and has no compunction over lying to them.
Item number one on the list of lies they told: that the president of the United States was just fine, was wholly competent, was not stricken with the ravages of advanced age.
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Now, in the aftermath of not one but two nationally televised expositions on his incapacity — both the presidential debate and the follow-up ABC News interview — there is a new subgenre of media commentary on its favorite topic, itself. "We were misled," is the summary of the whole, but of course they were not. They were partisans and they covered for their man.
Imagine, for a moment, Donald Trump — or Mitt Romney, or George W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan — having to be redirected at a public event by a man in an Easter bunny costume, or greeting a dead member of Congress, or confusing Egypt for Mexico: and then imagine the press giving a pass for it.
It’s impossible, and the reason it is impossible is because the rules are different for the left and its mouthpieces. But all this actually happened to Joe Biden. They saw, and they knew.
They knew, and they lied about it until the moment they couldn’t.
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Now the media is angry — you have read a lot of this too — and their anger is putatively directed toward the Biden team that misled them. But it’s really anger over having been exposed. When Americans learned who the president is, they learned who the press is too, and it reflects poorly on both parties. There was a bargain at play, and the side that failed to uphold it — in this case by failing to exhibit the most-basic level of public competence — is detested by the one left holding the bag.
All this means that the media apparatus, in its embarrassment and self-preservation, will now go after Joe Biden hard, in a way unseen since — well, since his immediate predecessor in office, who they also detested. They still do, and they were largely expecting to spend 2024 running interference to prevent Donald Trump’s return to office. It is a significant complication in plans now to have to labor to unseat not one president, but two — simultaneously.
Nevertheless, labor they will, and you’ll see it unfold with aggression across the coming days and weeks. For the past half-century or more, the media establishment has developed a taste for making and breaking presidents. You don’t see it before the modern era, but they were brought into the fold as court stenographers in the Kennedy era, and never really left. They played their part in that mythos, played their part in concluding the Johnson years, succeeded in driving Nixon from office, worked to do the same to Reagan, successfully denied George H.W. Bush a second term — not many know the infamous "supermarket scanner" incident was entirely made-up by a New York Times writer who was not present — ran interference for Clinton, and more or less made and elevated Barack Obama as their own creation.
The only president they couldn’t break, because he never cared what they thought or said, was Trump.
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Remember all this as you watch them exert themselves to push Biden out of the race. Biden deserves it — it is poetic that his decades of ego, fabulism, and arrogant denial culminate here, with the decrepit president a prisoner of Hunter and Jill’s defense of their lifestyles — but the press does not deserve this power.
The president of the United States is supposed to be answerable to the whole of the American people. He is the sole constitutional officer who is. That ought to mean something still. The fact that we’ve moved into an era in which the presidency is answerable to the American people and an ideological media is a profound departure from our constitutional order. We need to go back.
Getting back to that America — the one the founders actually envisaged and created — involves many things, many of them to be adjudicated on November 5th. But one of the most-important items on that agenda of restoration is returning to what the press ought to be. There’s a reason it and its privileges are enshrined in the First Amendment.
Conscience, speech, and press are indispensable to liberty, but they must all be free. A press — or media and journalism, two words the founders would not have used — that is just another faction of rule and domination is not truly free. It is not even truly a press.
When an apparatus and a mechanism that was meant to fulfill our ability to self-govern governs us instead, then it is time for a change.
