Quick, how many right-wing or populist MAGA types got their news from CNN during the Biden administration? Tick tock, tick tock?
Quick, how many left-wing or Biden types got their news from Fox News during the Biden administration? Tick tock, tick tock.
Both questions rate asking as self-regarding left wingers self-flagellate about how they failed themselves, their party, and – gasp – their nation by covering up Joe Biden’s rising senility while in the White House, but also as conservative media continue to promote the situational fiction that their readers mostly got their news about Biden from CNN and the New York Times. It’s performative nonsense all around.
Let’s start with all the hype surrounding the Jake Tapper book written with the “other guy” (an Amazon search says it's Alex Thompson) from Axios. Is it correct as the book implies that Biden supporters were somehow unaware of their man’s onrushing senility while in the White House? Clown question! To have read the New York Times during the Biden years was to read weekly commentary from lefty Gail Collins and right-of-center Bret Stephens routinely lamenting how unfit Biden was for the job precisely because of his age. And Stephens and Collins were hardly unique at the Times when it came to lament about the man seeking a second term.
Which gets right to the point about the left: they knew. Biden’s struggles were not just impossible to hide, they were a regular item of discussion on the left (and among Biden voters) regardless of Tapper’s own documented attempts to cover for Biden, and his subsequent self-flagellation. As Washington Post columnist Dan Balz put it in a recent piece about the mood of the Democratic electorate well before the debate that so many laughably say opened the broad electorate’s eyes to Biden’s infirmities, “A Washington Post-ABC News poll released in February 2023 found that nearly 6 in 10 Democrats and independents leaning Democratic wanted someone other than Biden as their 2024 nominee – an astonishing number for a sitting president.”
All of which raises a question: were these Biden-leaning voters getting their news from Fox News? It’s another clown question, but sometimes stupid questions are required in consideration of how over-the-top “shocked” Republicans in the media have been about the alleged Biden “cover-up,” which for at least one right winger was “one of the biggest scandals of my adult life” (Nicole Russell). Russell and others want us to believe that because the alleged “cover-up” was so blatant, voters will never trust the Democrats again. Oh please…If this were basketball, not a single referee would call charging.
That’s because Republicans knew. And they knew because they’re engaged in their own cover-up whereby they conveniently forget how Biden’s senility, his myriad droolings, his falls, and other old-people problems were the primary subject each night on Fox News and other right-of-center media. They revel in the high ratings for Fox News and other right-leaning media, but when it suits their own partisan purposes they pretend that the only sources of news out there are CNN and the New York Times, and more laughably, that Republicans and Trump voters routinely watch and read both.
Can both sides in the media please stop? Though they want it to be, it’s not all about them and their opposites in the media. Anyone with a pulse can see the performative fakery on both sides. Everyone knew, and if they didn’t know it wasn't because of the media, but because they're complete idiots.
