Media Coverage Of Biden’s Age Is The Latest Example Of The Double Standard That Exists!!!

(Media Matters)–Stories about Biden’s mental state are clearly catnip for political journalists. They can demonstrate how “fair” they are by providing negative coverage of Biden to balance their treatment of his likely opponent Donald Trump, who is an unhinged authoritarian facing scores of federal and state criminal charges, including for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election. And they don’t need to bone up on policy nuances separating the candidates — “is the president addled” is an easy venue for hot takes.

The choice for reporters is how they respond to such misstatements. On NPR, Mara Liasson said that the White House is pushing back by pointing out that Biden’s foes, like Fox’s Sean Hannity and Trump, have had similar mix-ups. “But the difference is that one of these missteps, one of these guys who forgets things, Biden, has become a viral meme, and it’s become a big problem for him,” she said. “Trump’s misstatements, for some reason, have not risen to that level.” It’s true that Trump’s own verbal missteps have not coalesced into an overarching narrative about his mental fitness for office. But the reason why is obvious: Political journalists decided to treat Biden’s missteps as a big problem, and Trump’s as a small one. They’re setting the agenda, following the lead of the Republican Party, the right-wing media, and now, Hur.

Popular Information’s Judd Legum reviewed the output of three major newspapers and found a “deluge of negative media coverage based on Hur’s conjecture” which treated “Hur’s amateur medical judgments as a political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his reelection campaign.”

“A Popular Information analysis found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles about Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory in the four days following the release of Hur’s report,” Legum wrote. “Incidents that raised questions about former President Trump’s mental state received far less coverage by the same outlets.”

Legum also found that the papers provided significantly less coverage of Trump’s recent mix-up of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

This story struck a nerve with me, because although coverage of Trump’s obvious mental decline has been largely ignored by most of the mainstream media outlets. It’s not just this subject where the media holds President Joe Biden to a far greater standard than they treat Donald Trump. President Biden gets handcuffed to nearly every single problem facing the nation and the world even if the American President has no actual authority or control over said issues. Trump has never been held to such an unreasonable expectation in his time in office or during his latest campaign. All Trump has ever been judged on has been his outlandish rhetoric and his crude behavior. He’s never faced the kind of scrutiny that Biden has received for things happening on his watch.

Let’s take inflation as an example. The reasons for inflation are global, a perfect storm of the war in Ukraine disrupting the world’s food supply along with the European gas shortages caused by the conflict. Then you have the Covid era of mass layoffs around the globe especially in China where they completely shut down the entire workforce. As the world rebounded from Covid the demand for goods and services far outpaced the supply chain that couldn’t rebound as fast. Every single nation has suffered the consequences of inflation, but somehow it became a Biden problem in America. Yet because of the economic decisions and legislative accomplishments made by the Biden Administration. The United States has had the fastest economic recovery, and the largest job creation in history. Manufacturing and the technology sector have all flourished since he took office. Wages have outpaced inflation in America which isn’t the case for the rest of the world. Biden has been full of solutions for the problems he inherited. But that has never been the media’s focus.

Staying with the inflation topic, if any President deserved blame for their actions that led to this worldwide crisis. Trump not Biden deserves the backlash. It was Trump’s disbanding of the Obama Pandemic Response Team a year before the Covid outbreak that allowed the disease to spread into a pandemic. Trump’s Administration had no plans for implementing a vaccine distribution strategy and left it up to Biden to solve. Trump’s anti-NATO campaign also emboldened the Putin regime to invade Ukraine. A war that was thought to take 3 days if Trump was still President has seen Ukraine fight valiantly against Russian forces because the Biden Administration has brought the NATO alliance back together.

These separate incidents had direct implications on how inflation started, but somehow Trump is allowed to use them as excuses. His record as President is often covered as though he had no control for what was happening all around him. When the world economy collapsed under his administration Trump acted as if he had no responsibility for it. His incompetence is a huge factor for what happened but you wouldn’t know that listening to the media. Unlike Biden who has been vilified for the mess because he’s the one tasked with the cleanup of the disastrous aftermath of Trump’s inabilities.

The media is always so focused on reporting what Trump says that they blatantly ignore the repercussions of his actions. This coverage of Biden’s “mental decline” narrative is just the latest twist on an ongoing political bias. With Biden, they act as if he has no grasp on the job he has successfully done since day one. Just because Trump has failed since his inauguration doesn’t make his cognitive decline less concerning. In fact, wouldn’t you always choose the guy whose ability starts at an extremely high level than the guy whose always been incompetent? Trump is currently campaigning to sell our trusted allies to Russian invasion for a cost. However, it’s Biden whom the media has labeled as “not in his right mind.” The false equivalency is not only dangerous it’s right-wing propaganda that the mainstream media is complicit in forcing upon the masses.

For the full Media Matters article quoted in this column click the link below

https://www.mediamatters.org/joe-biden/political-press-runs-hurs-scurrilous-partisan-attack