So as the nation heads into the Fourth of July holiday, former Vice President Joe Biden emerges from his basement and holds a press conference.
And the media? In stark contrast to the hardball they play with both the President and his White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany it was softball city.
A serious hat tip here to Fox’s Sean Hannity, who put together a hilarious montage of the pro-Biden “press” at work.
Fox’s Doug McKelway politely asks Biden a seriously serious question about the constant stories of Biden experiencing “cognitive decline” - aka dementia - to which Biden answers that he is being “constantly tested” for cognitive decline.
Say what? Now there’s a bombshell revelation. The Democratic nominee for President of the United States needs regular tests for “cognitive decline”? (!!!!) And the follow-up from the rest of the press corps? As Rush Limbaugh might say, “zero, nada, zilch.” As Hannity pointed out, questions about the growing politicization of mask wearing or the Black Lives Matters protests that have erupted into mass violence in American cities? None. The murder rate in Chicago, with the victims all black? President Obama is from Chicago, and he and Biden ran the country for eight years. Any question about why they didn’t do anything to halt the murder epidemic in Obama’s hometown? Nope.
And speaking of violence? All hell has broken loose in Seattle’s infamous “CHOP” zone, which, the day after Biden’s presser, has finally been shut down. But no questions about that either for Sleepy Joe. And what’s the big issue out there with Biden supporter Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her like minded progressive comrades? That, of course, would be defunding the police. Hard questions for Biden on defunding police? Would he voluntarily give up his own Secret Service protection? Should the Capitol Hill police who protect AOC and all members of Congress be defunded? Nah, no questions like that for Joe. Oh, and speaking of AOC? What’s with Biden and AOC’s “Green New Deal”? Not a question.
The reason for the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the first place is race. Just the other day the White House was being grilled about a presidential retweet of a video of Trump supporters in Florida’s The Villages, in which some nut on a golf cart shrieks “white power” as he drives by. So race is a big issue? Then the obvious - grill Biden on his past views on race, with everything from his eulogy for former Senate colleague and one-time Klan member Robert Byrd to his various statements in the 1970’s about his concern for his kids growing up in what Biden called a “racial jungle.”
Then there is more recent history. Documents have now been released by the Department of Justice that show Biden, in the waning days of the Obama-Biden administration, wanted to go after then-incoming Trump national security adviser General Michael Flynn. No questions probing that? Nah. And who can forget all the shenanigans with son Hunter Biden, who mysteriously has all these money-making connections in countries around the globe where Joe was riding point for the Obama administration. Hard questions from the Biden press corp about this? Nope again.
The contrast with the way the Biden press treated Biden and the way the White House press corp treats Trump could not be more stark. As Hannity noted of the Biden pressies:
“They didn’t interrupt him, they didn’t shout their questions, they didn’t fight, they didn’t try and grandstand. They lobbed one softball question after another.”
Not to mention that absent-minded Joe “actually admitted that he had a list of preferred reporters that he was supposed to call on.” Uh-oh.
Look. The American people are not stupid. There is a reason that Fox News is continually beating the pants off its cable news competitors CNN and MSNBC. There is a reason why, night after night, Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are winning the ratings in hands down fashion. There is a reason Hannity’s town hall-style interview with President Trump scored the highest ratings in Fox’s history. There is a reason for the stunning and on-going mega-success of Rush, Hannity and Mark Levin, not to mention the success of the wider conservative media writ large.
I have noted this before, but in the wake of the Biden presser and the softball treatment he received - and will continue to receive throughout the election season - it is worth reminding for those who haven’t read up on the press coverage of the long ago Kennedy-Nixon campaign in 1960, a full sixty years ago.
The press coverage of JFK versus Nixon was heavily tilted to JFK. The late Theodore H. White, a JFK friend and fan himself, candidly described the press that covered JFK in White’s groundbreaking and Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the campaign, The Making of the President 1960. After describing the outright hostility the Nixon press corps had for the candidate they were covering, White wrote this of the reporters covering JFK:
“By the last weeks of the campaign, those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps-they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers. When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr. Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.”
In other words? The press was in the tank for JFK then, just as they have been in the tank for every Democratic presidential nominee since 1960. Just as they are in the tank for Joe Biden in 2020.
The difference - the very big difference in 2020? The American people themselves have long since caught on to the game - and in catching on they have signaled mightily that they have had enough. More than enough. It might even be said that the reason Donald Trump won in 2016 in the first place - or one of them at least - is that millions of Americans were in open rebellion against not only the swamp of Washington elites but from what they saw as a thoroughly biased if not outright corrupt media that was and is the calling card of the swamp elites.
All of which leads to an obvious question. Will the constant pro-Biden bias in the media so infuriate millions of Americans that it backfires, big time? Is the Biden press corp in fact actually in the clearly unintended process of re-electing Donald Trump?
Stay tuned.
And happy Fourth of July!
