It’s no secret the left-wing media abruptly lose interest in covering presidential gaffes when Democrats take the White House. Well, they’re doing it again: over the past few months liberal cable and broadcast news networks have utterly ignored a slew of mistakes and fumbles by President Biden.
At the G-7 Summit in June, Biden mistakenly referred to Syria as Libya three separate times during a speech. Aides later confirmed that he had, in fact, meant Syria. That same month, the President wrongly conflated the Tuskegee Airmen — a predominantly black contingent of World War II fighter pilots — with victims of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
Both times, broadcast (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and cable (CNN and MSNBC) networks shrugged.
Last week brought yet another gaffe that these same channels ignored. While visiting a truck factory in Pennsylvania last Wednesday, Biden abruptly claimed: “I used to drive an 18-wheeler.” After some digging around, journalists concluded that no, no he didn’t. Once again, this received zero airtime from the aforementioned broadcast and cable outlets.
A rare few of the President’s recent fumbles have caused enough of a stir to require airtime from his lackeys in TV news. In these instances, the strategy has generally been to lamely excuse his behavior.
For example, when Biden claimed earlier this month that FaceBook was “killing people” by not doing more to combat COVID misinformation, CNN’s Jim Acosta hosted a bunch of former Democratic operatives to spin the event as a positive. “I thought it was terrific,” CNN commentator Paul Begala opined, adding, “It’s about time.”
Later, Begala’s fellow panelist, David Gergen added, “The President was right in what he said. It technically is true that people are being killed by disinformation.”
Obviously, none of these gaffes have massive political implications. But the gaffes aren’t the story here. The story is that the same media, who for the last four years enthusiastically pounced on every slight misstep by a Republican President, have suddenly stopped caring about gaffes now that there’s a Democrat in the White House.
