The Regime Media Rewrite History For Jimmy Carter’s Passing

Jorge Bonilla
December 29th, 2024 10:52 PM

Text to Speech

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The 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, has shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 100. Those who remain and are tasked with covering his passing have chosen to do so while putting a rosy glaze over his presidency. In doing so, they neglected history.

Carter’s passing forced the evening newscasts to reconfigure their rundowns on an otherwise slow news night. The media’s collective A-blocks were focused on Carter, with the aforementioned rosy glaze. Here’s how ABC’s Mary Bruce kicked off World News Tonight:

MARY BRUCE: We begin tonight with breaking news, the death of the 39th President of the United States. Jimmy Carter. At 100 years old, Carter living longer than any other U.S. President. He served just four years in The White House and went on to transform the role of former presidents, traveling the globe as a fierce defender of human rights. Carter also enjoying an incredible love story with his wife, Rosalynn, the couple partners in every sense of the word. Married for 77 years. The tributes pouring in tonight. The flag at The White House now at half staff, and New York's Empire State Building lit up in red, white, and blue. And the mourners paying their respects, already lining up at The Carter Center.

Mary Bruce’s introduction is emblematic of the coverage accorded to Carter’s passing at ABC: big emphasis on Carter’s personal life, less so on his presidency- which many Americans who were around at the time considered to be the worst in the modern era.

CBS’s Norah O’Donnell sought to portray a more unvarnished version of Mr. Carter’s record, but misrepresented history in the process:

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NORAH O’DONNELL: In 1976, America's bicentennial year, he beat Mr. Ford to become the nation's 39th president.

WALTER CRONKITE: …tradition-shattering walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.

O’DONNELL: But the next four years were rocky. As oil prices and inflation soared, his popularity sank. Yet, President Carter did achieve many of his goals. He created the Departments of Energy and Education. Established formal diplomatic ties with China, and returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama. Perhaps his greatest achievement was an historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, known as the Camp David Accords.

JIMMY CARTER: The deep and ancient antagonism can be settled without bloodshed.

O’DONNELL: At the same time, he became the first U.S. president to confront the threat of militant Islam. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 American hostages. A U.S. military attempt to free the hostages in April of 1980 ended in disaster. Eight American servicemen were killed. The very next November, with Americans still held hostage overseas and inflation soaring at home, Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. Mr. Carter spent his final days in The White House negotiating the release of the hostages.

RONALD REAGAN: I, Ronald Reagan --

O’DONNELL: Iran would not let them go until a few minutes after he left office.

The outgoing anchor of the CBS Evening News essentially misrepresented history in order to burnish Carter’s record, implying that he faced a unique threat in militant Islam. But that historic distinction belongs to Thomas Jefferson. Per Christopher Hitchens:

But one cannot get around what Jefferson heard when he went with John Adams to wait upon Tripoli’s ambassador to London in March 1785. When they inquired by what right the Barbary states preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America’s two foremost envoys were informed that “it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.” (It is worth noting that the United States played no part in the Crusades, or in the Catholic reconquista of Andalusia.)

Jefferson, not Carter.

Over at NBC, chief Biden apple polisher Mike Memoli found a way to tie Biden into the ongoing Carter coverage:

MIKE MEMOLI: Biden has said he plans to deliver a eulogy for the former president, one that will likely draw on their decades-long relationship. In 1976 Biden, then a young senator, was the first politician outside of Georgia to endorse Carter's candidacy. In office, both men faced similar challenges. Working to bring peace in the Middle East, and to secure the release of American hostages. But ultimately, the country’s economic struggles contributed to them sharing a distinction as one-term presidents.  

In drawing a historic parallel between Biden and Carter, Memoli did little more than call attention to the common themes underlining the historic awfulness of their respective presidencies.

ABC, CBS, and NBC made sure to paint as rosy a picture of the Carter presidency as possible, much to the detriment of younger viewers who did not have to endure it. Not mentioned at all on ABC, CBS, and NBC: Carter’s penchant for murderous dictators. Shockingly, taxpayer-funded PBS did raise this issue:

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JIMMY CARTER:  The best times of my life have been after The White House. You have served a great nation, the greatest nation on Earth, and then you have freedom from political obligations. You have an almost unlimited menu of things that you can either choose or say no. 

JUDY WOODRUFF: His new agenda did lead to occasional run-ins with his successors in The White House. As in 1994, when the Clinton White House balked at Mr. Carter's talks with North Korean leader Kim il-sung on freezing his government's nuclear program. And in 2002, when he made waves in Cuba, meeting with President Fidel Castro, and calling for an end to the decades-long U.S. embargo. He was also a vocal critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But his diplomatic work, including the Camp David accords , ultimately won him the 2002 Nobel peace prize. And the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He remained in the public eye through his final years, and he minced no words in his attitudes about President Trump.

JIMMY CARTER: There's no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered.

Unfortunately, the accurate telling of Carter’s dalliance with dictators came with a dose of election denialism-fueled conspiracy theory. This is who Carter actually was, as opposed to the secular saint we’re seeing projected across the Regime Media.

Carter’s death drew significant coverage on Spanish-language media as well, albeit not a large chink of the A-block. Here’s how Telemundo opened up:

JAVIER VEGA: Former President Jimmy Carter died this Sunday peacefully and surrounded by his family in Plains, Georgia, under hospice care since February 2023. Carter was seen in public at the end of his life on several occasions, including his wife's funeral. As the oldest former president in history, he lived to witness the celebrations for his 100th birthday, which he reached (while) being, according to surveys, the best-known and most popular Democrat in the country, who always made it clear that he wasn’t worried about death.

JIMMY CARTER: I would say that the years since I left The White House have been as productive and as gratifying- and as challenging as the years in The White House. So I've had a very good life.

VEGA: A Christian and Democrat with no experience in Washington, he arrived at the White House in 1977. He did so walking from the Capitol to demonstrate that his would be a closer government (to the people). Carter fared better abroad than at home. In the international arena, he was key as a mediator in conflicts.

And here is a sampling of Univision’s coverage:

MARIA MOLINA: Former President Jimmy Carter was the longest-serving former president in United States history to date. He died today at the age of 100 in Georgia, where he was originally from. President Carter arrived at the White House in 1976, but his term only lasted one term. He lost re-election against Ronald Reagan. And the final days of his presidency were marked by the 52 American hostages who were held hostage at the US embassy in Tehran. It was precisely on the last day of Jimmy Carter's presidency when these hostages were released. But Elyangelica, former President Carter is very much remembered for what he did after leaving the presidency as well. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his constant search for conflict resolution, for his fight to protect human rights in the world. And already in 1979 he had been on the verge of winning this Nobel Peace Prize for having managed to bring together the then president of Egypt and the prime minister of Israel who later signed the Camp David peace agreement that managed to end a 31-year conflict. between Egypt and Israel. And President Jimmy Carter is also remembered for that beautiful relationship he had with Rossalyn Carter, his wife of 77 years, who also died last year at the age of 96. And that was the last time we saw Jimmy Carter, at the funeral of his wife Rossalyn Carter. 

Interesting that their Spanish-language coverage sort of went over Carter’s closeness with dictators but doesn’t mention Carter’s role in legitimizing former Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, which has been a disaster for the entire hemisphere.

Jimmy Carter’s legacy certainly merits examination in the wake of his passing. Rather than examine the man, though, the media manufactured a recount of the Carter years that seems overly gauzy and not at all connected with the painful reality of the effects his policies wrought on the American public.

 

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