Here is a piece by a writer about the miserable state of journalism these days. They distort the truth for an agenda -- yes, even the mainstream media who pretend to be objective. Read it.
--Kim
A year has passed. There has still been nothing in mainstream news media remotely resembling the dogpile on Biden's frailties for the decaying and solipsistic idiot in the white house who when not burbling inanities or taking naps in public or fomenting hate is posting insane shit all night on social media.
While harshing at Trump voters is a pastime, I think the majority of Americans don't follow the news as closely and carefully as most of you reading this do (and for overworked people that's partly a matter of time). They often get their news from mainstream /corporate media or what trickles down from it, and they literally did not know what they were voting for as those institutions played down the connections to Project 2025, the threats in Project 2025, the extremism in Trump's agenda and the crime and destruction in his recent past. They own a lot of the blame for his reelection, but they'll never acknowledge it. But I will.
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Wrote a thing. In fury.
An unnamed source says that at an earlier point in time it was thought that a octogenarian might come to need to use a wheelchair at a future date, but the person in question has as of press time not reached that point, but continues to walk and bike, and the journalists reporting this allegation don't name the source. Someone thought a thing could've happened but it hasn't and we don't know quite who that someone is. Did that rock your world yet? It has rocked the world of mainstream media, which cooked up some hyperventilating headlines about the hypothetical about a politician no longer in office.
We in the USA are in deep trouble and a major reason for the trouble we're in is the mainstream media and their many persistent distortions of truth, fact, reality in service of their agendas and the limits of their worldview (and lack of resistance to intimidation by the right). That habit has contributed hugely to a misinformed electorate, which in turn contributes to the outcomes of elections. The msm have sins of omission (not covering or playing down important and impactful news, including out of deference to the right), sins of obsession (pumping up minor stories into manufactured scandal and drama), and sins of distortion ( many kinds of bias manifested in many ways).
These powerful institutions routinely pretend they have no actual influence but are somehow standing behind a glass partition just quietly observing what happened, so they takes no responsibility for outcome, even as they exhibit huge biases and overt agendas, up to and including major impact on American elections, which in turn do much to shape (or sabotage) the fate of the world. While right-wing media are regularly excoriated, mainstream media sabotages democracy and justice less obviously but, because of its broader audiences, more effectively.
Its players seem to play for each others' approval so they dogpile, build echo chambers, feed off each other, install filter bubbles and huddle behind confirmation biases. They collectively fabricate official versions of what happened that often diverge from the facts. Right now a prime example is contaminating the informational drinking water. It should be the dullest story ever, the smallest potatoes, the most nothing-scented nothingburger, but while the Trump Administration plays nice with autocrats in the middle east and terrorizes brown people who are undocumented, or here legally, or actually citizens, sabotages the global economy, and dismantles the federal government while trying to destroy all our rights and also the rule of law, media bigwigs Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios (but also a CNN pundit, because media inbreeding is a thing) are selling a book about Joe Biden with the pumped-up title Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Books take a long time to write, edit, proofread, lay out, print, and distribute, so they likely decided to work on this before the election – perhaps they were hoping to do some damage to a Harris administration, but they're distracting from a Trump Administration instead. In Christian theology, original sin is what Adam and Eve committed by disobeying God; in American history, slavery is often said to be this nation's original sin; but in this book it's being old.
The New York Times, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, New York Magazine, and of course CNN and Axios have all featured stories in the last few days generally treating its contents as gospel, piling on its claims that key people cited in the book (which is not out yet, but apparently available to select sources) say aren't true. Political scientist and Atlantic contributor Norman Orenstein tweeted in a rare dissent, "I have a hard time watching journalists high five each other over books on WH covering up for Biden. A diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election. False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception."
In the present moment, many of them have glommed onto Tapper and Thompson's unnamed source's claim that someone said Biden might someday need a wheelchair and inflated it into a headline-grabbing scandal. They thereby conflate physical and cognitive decline, which is insulting to all the brilliant people of all ages who get around on wheels. We did once have a president who used a wheelchair, and he was the most powerful and effective president of the twentieth century and arguably the greatest. Franklin Delano Roosevelt served three terms and part of a fourth while mobility-impaired thanks to polio – you know, the terrible disease that almost disappeared in this country after 1955 because of a vaccine that Health and Human services secretary RFK Jr. would maybe like to withdraw
the rest at link [including paragraphs about the three people so far who have said accounts in the book about incidents they were supposed to have been present at never happened]....
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