Article by Jennifer Oliver O'Connell in RedState
Telegraph UK Destroys the US Media for Enabling Biden, While Biden Whines About Suddenly "Hawkish" Media
It would be a huge laughfest, if it wasn’t so tragic. British journalist and author Douglas Murray calls out the legacy media for aiding and abetting the installation of this feckless failure of a U.S. president:
The world appears to have woken up to an important truth this week: which is that Joe Biden is a truly terrible president. It is a shame that it took America gifting Afghanistan back to the Taliban for so many people to realise this.
To be charitable, there were perhaps two reasons why this had not become more obvious before. The first is that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump and for a lot of the planet that seems to be recommendation enough to occupy the Oval Office. A break from the Trump show appealed to an awful lot of people.
But the second reason why too few realised what the world was going to get from a Biden presidency is that the US media simply didn’t ask the questions it needed to ask. Before the election a near entirety of the American media gave up covering it and simply campaigned for the Democrat nominee.
Yep, and the Trump hatred and fatigue was fueled and fomented by this same media. It wasn’t just about asking the questions that needed to be asked. It was a full-on disregard of what was already known about Joe Biden. His lifelong racism was at the top of the list, but the fact that he was a plagiarist, a sexual assaulter, and a creepy, sniffy, Uncle Joe around young girls should have been pointed out and plastered across every newsfeed and chryon. Instead, it was excused, covered up, and actively suppressed by the U.S. media.
And speaking of suppression, Murray had more than a few words for our Big Tech overlords:
It was the same with the Big Tech companies. So persuaded were they (Twitter in particular) that they had been responsible for Donald Trump’s election in 2016 that during the 2020 race they did everything they could to get Biden in. That included – and this cannot be said often enough – effectively muting America’s oldest newspaper: the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden‘s laptop, which contained serious allegations of corrupt tail-coating by Hunter and other members of the Biden family when Joe was vice-president. But Big Tech restricted the story from being shared and almost no other journalists bothered to follow it up.
We at RedState not only followed the Hunter Biden Laptop story closely, but reported, and are still following up on Hunter and the rest of the Biden Crime Family. Big Tech is still playing suppression games, but with the presidency failing, the COVID narrative falling, and a legacy media flailing in the wake of real journalism produced from this outlet and others, their stranglehold and ability to drive the narrative is bottoming out.
Because they know it would be beyond criminal not to report what is happening Afghanistan, and not to ask the hard questions that should have been asked 12 months ago, the legacy media is actually trying to be… <*gasp*>, <*clutch the pearls*> journalists!
The Huffington Post is having a real problem with this, and so is the White House:
Read this and try not to laugh out loud. https://t.co/8OmHqxNONY
— Brit Hume (@brithume) August 21, 2021
As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on Friday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.
“Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?” the reporter said.
Notwithstanding the militant group’s poor human rights record and ultra-conservative Islamist ideology, multiple U.S. administrations have successfully negotiated with the Taliban. The Taliban have complex interests. As Biden noted on Friday, the organization is at war with the faction of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is competing for power in Afghanistan.
But the reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality.
Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.
“The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,” said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. “They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.”
That last paragraph is less “laughing out loud” and more “shaking my damn head.” You know it’s bad when journalists trying to actually do their job is labeled a “rush to judgment” and a “frenzy.”
But they painted themselves into that corner by being kingmakers and cheerleaders, rather than real news people. Murray brings this point home with Biden’s last CNN Townhall:
Until you see it up close you just cannot believe the cravenness of most of the American media. Last month the CNN presenter Don Lemon was selected to quiz Biden at a “town hall” event before the cameras. Biden was, as usual, meandering and unfocused as though lost in the fog of his own sentences. But Lemon would not press him properly. Rather, you could see him urging the president on, willing him to get to the end of the sentence or to reconnect with one of those trains of thought that been left derailed several clauses or sentences back. It wasn’t journalism. It wasn’t even kindness. He was rooting for the president.
The footage this week from Afghanistan has at least exposed the some of the problems that have resulted from this lack of critique. Not least the fact that the Commander in Chief appears unfocused on the serious questions.
How about unfocused PERIOD. The cavalier attitude being exhibited by
not only Dementia Joe, but his generals and the State Department is
mind-boggling, and any media person worth his or her salt is obligated
to drive them hard on this. But HuffPost PuffHo wants to
kvetch about past administrations driving the narrative and trying to
pin their failure on Biden. One of the multitude of pundits I have
listened to over the past week said it well: This failure has many
fathers, but the failure to properly take care of the American people
and American property is fully in President Job Biden’s lap.
But Biden would rather complain about how hard everyone is being on him, and that his vacation was interrupted.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan…
All the queer theory in the world will not help the women of Afghanistan | The National https://t.co/DSJTJApbl3
— Annie Bishop #CEP LLB (hons) PhD in making a fuss (@killhopelaw) August 21, 2021
