Marriage of Convenience: Biden and the Mainstream Media

When Ronald Reagan served as the nation’s 40th president, major news outlets pulverized him whenever he misspoke or made a hasty comment.

News stories, editorials, and political columns questioned his fitness for office and argued that when elected in 1980, at the age of 69, he was too old to hold the office of chief executive.

Forty years later, the nation’s 46th president, 79-year-old Joe Biden, known for his countless gaffes, embellishments, tall tales, and cognitive decline, gets a pass from the mainstream media.

Why was Reagan, one of the 20th century’s most successful presidents, treated so poorly by the media while the failing Biden is treated with kid gloves?

The answer is: ideological bias.

In Reagan’s time, however, deceitful liberal journalists portrayed themselves as objective, open-minded, even-handed, and dispassionate professionals devoted to seeking and telling the truth.

That "above the fray" charade was dropped during the Age of Trump.

To wreck the 45th president’s administration and to elect a doddering Biden, broadcast and print journalists became front and center political activists.

The NBC Nightly News anchor, Lester Holt, praised this transition in a speech he delivered at a 2021 awards dinner. "I think it’s become clear that fairness is overrated," he said.

"The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in."

There you have it.

The "Holt Doctrine" governs the news industry; and its first tenet is — prop up Joe Biden no matter how bizarre his blather or how misguided his policies.

The media and Biden collaboration is the subject of Joe Concha’s engrossing new book, "Come On Man: The Truth About Joe Biden’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Presidency."

A longtime media and political columnist for The Hill, Concha makes the case that Biden "has been a guy who usually padded his resume, boosted his hard scrapple credibility … [and] will say or do anything that is politically expedient."

And thanks to accommodating journalists, Biden has got away with his mishaps and lies that would have ended the public careers of other politicians.

Here are a few examples:

When it was revealed in 1988 that he stole parts of speeches from British politician Neil Kinnock, Biden admitted to the plagiarism but said it was "not malevolent," and because he was a victim of dirty politics, ended his quest for the presidency.

The Press accepted this malarkey, and he went back to serving in the Senate as though nothing happened.

In 2008 when commenting on Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy he said, "I mean you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man."

"Picture anyone remotely right of Center," Concha writes, "saying that of any black guy. The Pitchfork Protest Store would run out of pitchforks to protest with."

In 2020, Biden, boasting at a New Hampshire campaign event that he had a high IQ, proceeded to lie about having had a full academic scholarship in law school; lied about ending up in the top half of his class; lied about winning The International Moot Court competition; and lied about graduating with, get this, 3 undergraduate degrees.

And he got away with that pile of malarkey, too.

Then there were these gaffes Biden committed on the 2020 campaign trail:

• "Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids."
• "We hold these truths to be self-evident: All men and women are created, by the —go — you know the, you know the thing.”
• "I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump then you ain’t black."

In 2020, Biden was not questioned about lies, misstatements, Hunter Biden’s financials, and an “in the basement” campaign because establishment elites wanted Trump stopped.

"The left-wing monoculture in the media" Concha notes "is so strong that in 2020 they just couldn’t bring themselves to ask Joe Biden any tough questions."

Since Biden was sworn into office, the media has continued to protect him from scrutiny.

They have given little coverage to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the crime surge in American cities, 2.3 million illegal immigrants crossing our border, inflation hitting 40-year highs, 400 people a day dying from COVID-19, the opioid overdose crisis, and "his unsteady grasp of the truth or reality."

Joe Concha concludes "Come On Man" thusly:

"Joe Biden will go down as the worst president of our lifetime.

Yet many in our media will continue to prop him up for as long as possible.

"Too many journalists have forsaken objectivity. When he leaves the stage, they’ll seek an even more extreme candidate, assuming that his failures were due to his 'normalcy' rather than his extreme policies.

"They’ll embrace someone even father left. Social media will do their part as well. The fix will be in."

Pretty scary outlook, don’t you think?

George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.