This is completely out of control
At the very start of the Biden era, Palmer Report pointed out that one of his biggest challenges would be that the media wouldn’t know how to hit its ratings marks during his non-scandalous presidency, and that it would therefore resort to making up phony scandals about him. Sure enough, it’s come to a head this past week.
First we saw the Associated Press try to make a scandal out of the fact that Biden has dared to visit Delaware. Now we’re seeing several major news outlets, including some of the better MSNBC hosts, try to massively overstate what’s going on at the border in the name of ginning up a scandal.
We’re suddenly hearing the media refer to a “border crisis.” Wait a minute, really? The former guy spent four years kidnapping immigrant children from their parents and locking them in cages, and the media barely even covered it, but now it’s a crisis? Get real.
The problem with this kind of histrionic, clickbait, ratings-driven “reporting” on phony scandals is that it hands the Republicans the phony talking points they’re looking for, heading into 2022 and 2024. For every one of you reading this who knows that the border didn’t suddenly become a crisis, there’s someone in the political middle who doesn’t know what to think, and is prone to falling for Republican lies.
The media, including a number of major liberal-leaning media outlets, are now doing the Republicans’ job for them. The media should be hard on the Democrats, but not harder than they are on the Republicans. And the media is totally in the wrong when it tries to invent phony Democratic scandals for ratings. The media played this dangerous game with Hillary Clinton’s phony email scandal, and it got us four years of Trump.
The kicker is that, even as the media desperately tries to get a number of phony Biden scandals off the ground, it’s also trying to create a scandal out of the fact that Biden isn’t holding a press conference. Gee, wonder why he’s not holding a press conference. He knows the media will just use it to try to amplify the phony scandals they’re trying to get off the ground.
The media isn’t the public’s enemy. But it isn’t the public’s friend, either. The only people who can hold the media accountable, and pressure them into backing off from this kind of tabloid level nonsense, are those of you reading this. When you see an MSNBC or CNN host or a newspaper columnist trying to gin up a phony Biden scandal, respectfully but forcefully let them know that they’re not going to get any ratings or page views out of it from you. The media’s phony narratives have the power to cost us elections, as happened in 2016. We can’t sit back and let it happen again.
