First, and on a personal note, my wife and I have long-time friends who are struggling right now. The wife has a brain tumor. The situation has progressed to her husband needing to take a leave of absence from his job. They’re in a tough financial spot. Christy and I have contributed and if you might be able to and inclined, please consider helping. In lieu of being able to help financially, prayer works too. I really cannot thank you enough.
The other day, Jake Tapper of CNN had on the Wall Street Journal reporters who covered Joe Biden’s decline. He referred to them as “heroic reporters” for covering Biden’s decline.
Here is CNN’s then-media reporter Oliver Darcy in 2024 covering the same story:
The Wall Street Journal owes its readers — and the public — better.
The business broadsheet published and hyped a story Wednesday declaring that “behind closed doors,” President Joe Biden has shown “signs of slipping.” The story questioned Biden’s mental acuity, playing into a GOP-propelled narrative that the 81-year-old president lacks the fitness to hold the nation’s highest office.
But an examination of the report reveals a glaring problem: Most of the sources reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes relied on were Republicans. In fact, buried in the story, the reporters themselves acknowledged that they had drawn their sweeping conclusion based on GOP sources who, obviously, have an incentive to make comments that will damage Biden’s candidacy.
Jake Tapper told the Wall Street Journal reporters, “I said it last year before the election and I’ll say it again, the journalism you did was vital and the smear campaign by Democrats against you two is disgraceful.”
Jake is right. But Oliver Darcy was at CNN at the time as a media reporter and Darcy participated in that smear.
Brian Stelter, another CNN media reporter, did a monologue as the Hunter Biden laptop story came out in which he examined “how the newest anti-Biden narrative was manufactured.”
“So Fox is a producer of this serialized drama, but there are big questions about who might have created this show. That’s what’s probably most important here. CNN reported on Friday that U.S. authorities are seeing if those e-mails we just talked about are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort. Huh. Now we already know some of the American producers of this drama, because ‘The New York Post’ says it was tipped off to the existence of the emails by Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon. Then Rudy Giuliani gave the ‘Post’ a copy of a hard drive containing the e-mails,” Stelter said.
The emails were real. It was not a Russian disinformation plot.
Brian Stelter never held reporters or Democrats to account for the fifty-plus national security experts who insisted the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian plot. One of those reporters wound up at CNN and has been working her way up the ladder.
They claimed it was fake news. It was real. There was no accountability,
Stelter both now as an on-air commentator at CNN and formerly as a paid host at CNN, obsessed about Fox News and Fox’s coverage of Trump and Biden. Stelter and Darcy both, more than once, reported on how Fox would not cover certain stories that did not play well with Trump voters.
Where have Darcy and Stelter been about MSNBC?
Here is Jenn Psaki, Joe Biden’s White House press secretary turned MSNBC host, covering Joe Biden’s post-debate speech at the end of June 2024:
She can’t avoid the fallout of the debate, but does her best loyal soldier routine. To my knowledge, Brian Stelter has never questioned MSNBC’s coverage of Joe Biden’s decline. Neither has Oliver Darcy.
Here she was letting Adam Schiff on her show to riff on the Robert Hur conclusions that Joe Biden was too enfeebled to stand trial. She let him speak for her, unchallenged, to dispute Hur’s conclusions as partisan.
There is no record that I can find of Brian Stelter ever questioning the propriety of Joe Biden’s former White House press secretary having on a Democrat partisan candidate for the Senate and sitting congressman to dispute the legal findings of a special prosector about Joe Biden.
Stelter regularly questioned the propriety and potential conflicts of interest of Fox hosts and their interviews.
This, by the way, ignores CNN’s own handling of the Robert Hur conclusions on its network, which, like MSNBC, did a “both sides” claim even as it was more and more obvious to Americans that something really was wrong with Biden. Side note, one of the reporters who subtly noted the Biden problems was NBC White House reporter Peter Alexander. Just consider this:
Yes, consider that clip — we all saw it. It was notable enough for Peter Alexander to point it out. Still, the press corps collectively claims they had no idea anything was wrong with Biden because their “sources” denied it.
No one at CNN has covered MSNBC’s protection of Biden and dismissal of concerns about Joe Biden. Not even this from Joe Scarborough.
To his credit, Scarborough himself has been more reflective and honest about what led him to do that on air and how and why he got it wrong than any coverage of it from Brian Stelter who holds himself out as a media accountability expert.
CNN covered Fox News’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as if Fox News was collaborating with the Russians.
CNN still has on Brian Stelter to comment on the media but has never asked Brian Stelter about the media’s own failures to get the story or about how MSNBC chose to deflect the story.
I focus on CNN here because Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios have written the definitive and damning story of the cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline.
But what we are not getting is how the media participated. Tapper can call the Wall Street Journal reporters heroic, but it was his CNN colleague at the time who cast doubts on the story, not just Democrats.
Tapper can expose Democrats for their complicity in the coverup, but his colleague Brian Stelter has never held MSNBC accountable in the way he has a long and obsessive well-documented history of calling Fox News to account for its coverage of Trump and Biden.
That is just CNN.
Axios, itself, ran stories deflecting and dodging on Joe Biden’s decline even as their own Alex Thompson was, in real time, reporting on Biden’s decline.
Washington Post’s fact-checkers routinely claimed Republicans were lying about Joe Biden when we know they were telling the truth.
Or here is Jack Blanchard, the Managing Editor and Author of Politico Playbook interviewing Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan just yesterday:
Take Sullivan in full “cover-your-ass” mode out of it. Sullivan is a partisan hack of the Biden White House. You expect him to lie and deflect. He has to protect his wife, now a congresswoman, and wants to protect the Biden legacy.
But Blanchard is under no such obligation and still says, “The accusation is not that he could never perform well, is that — it was that he couldn’t do it all the time, that — that he was only able to function well for a few hours in the day, that he would have moments of forgetfulness.”
But it was not an accusation. It was the truth that you and I all saw with our own eyes. By treating it as an accusation instead of what we all witnessed, Blanchard, like Stelter, Darcy, the Washington Post fact-checkers, etc. gets to avoid engaging in the issue of media culpability. It remains a he said vs. he said story where now Tapper and Thompson are accusers making accusations, not reporters reporting facts.
Distrust in the American media is at an all-time high. The American press corps is using the Tapper/Thompson book as a way to claim Democrats conspired to cover up Joe Biden’s infirmities. But the American press corp itself participated.
You and I know they did because they hate Trump, January 6th was radicalizing for them, and they lacked the courage of their convictions to do their job and ask tough questions at the time because they preferred Biden to both Trump and the truth of Biden’s condition.
In 2021, over 70% of Americans were concerned about Joe Biden’s physical and mental condition. Until the press corps is willing to openly and reflectively talk about how it found itself uniformly and completely in the 30% minority, the press cannot even begin to rebuild its reputation.
I stand by what I said yesterday on my show and will have more right at noon today.
I think January 6th was bad. It was not good. Those people were not heroes. They were rioters fueled by lies about the election.
But the multiyear coverup of Joe Biden’s physical and mental decline by the Democratic Party and the American Press was far worse a threat to democracy. They enabled an unelected group of political apparatchiks to control the power of the Executive Branch without accountability or congressional oversight. They used an autopen to forge the President’s name on documents. They set public policies that altered the lives of Americans in the name of a barely functioning President. They put the lives of American soldiers at risk. They did undermine democracy in a way the press and Democrats claim Trump supporters tried, but failed, to do on January 6th.
The only difference is one streamed live on television and the press insisted we stare at it. The other streamed live on television and the press insisted we stop believing our lying eyes about it.
Until the press can be honest and reflective about its role in this and how it refused to see what everyone else saw, forget rebuilding trust. The American press corps itself participated in a threat to democracy worse than what happened on January 6th. They helped cover up a President whose decision-making while in mental decline cost the lives of more than a dozen American soldiers and let out of prison violent criminals with clemency and pardons. And ultimately they, with the Democrats, helped get Donald Trump re-elected.
8,647
Side note — Former FBI Director James Comey posted a picture from the beach of seashells arranged to spell 8647.
I admit I wondered how 8,647 was a controversial number until someone pointed out to me I should be reading it as 86 47. Well, that makes it pretty obvious.
Leftwing social media has started filling up with people displaying 8647 as a subtle way to advocate for the assassination of Donald Trump or eighty-six the forty-seventh president.
Comey claimed, subsequently, that he assumed it was a political message, but didn’t know it was advocating violence. I was never the FBI Director, so you’ll have to forgive me for not knowing West Coast gang symbology in a way the FBI Director probably would.
But, and this is a big but, I’d be charitably inclined to think maybe, like me, James Comey isn’t into numerological messages of violence except after his photo and the blowback, Comey announced he has a new forthcoming book.
It sure seems most likely he was trying to get attention so he could plug his book.
