In the wake of Donald Trump’s crushing presidential victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, the major media are indicting all the usual suspects, beginning with claimed “disinformation” from conservative sources. But these targets, though falsely accused, do point to the true culprits.
Morning Joe’s Scarborough, for example, blamed the failure to elect Kamala Harris on misogynistic black and Hispanic males. Other commentators claimed that it was the uneducated females who were not true to the cause. Sunny Hostin of The View noted that Trump’s victory was one of “cultural resentment,” because America could not elect a mixed-race female married to a Jewish man. David Axelrod said that racial bias and misogyny could not be ignored in this election.
The media have projected a dark turn for the country. The New York Times editorial board called the election result a “perilous choice,” with America on the “precipice” of an “authoritarian style of governance.” Historian John Meacham cited the treasonous attempted “coup” of January 6 as proving a fascist victory.
Now to more specific finger-pointing from the media. Many media commentators are criticizing Harris, citing her failure to name Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Of course, Joe Biden hampered Harris, they write, by waiting so long to drop out, after stubbornly staying in a race he should not have entered to begin with. And don’t forget the awful performance of Tim Walz, an attractive target for many in the media.
In all of these discussions, the media do not point to a prominent element common to each of the perceived problems: the media themselves. Of course, the media were too compromised by partisan motives to report what they had known for most of Biden’s term: he clearly suffered from advanced dementia. As Axios political reporter Hans Nichols recently noted on Fox’s America’s Newsroom, the media came down hard on any reporter who proposed a well sourced story on Biden’s lack of acuity, because that would help Trump.
Publicizing this infirmity would have had several salutary results. Obviously, as all disappointed Democrats now appear to admit, Biden should have dropped out of the race earlier. But the same media relaying this judgment do not point a finger at themselves for aiding and abetting his clueless clinging to power.
Perhaps more significantly, there was no media voice questioning the president’s fitness for office per the 25th Amendment. This amendment was explicitly meant for the exact situation this country faced these past four years: presidential senility. This issue is important in a world exploding into war, from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Taiwan Straits. But the media put partisan politics above world peace and national security.
After Biden was forced to drop out of the race when Nancy Pelosi finally brandished the 25th Amendment, were the media truthful about their past dereliction? Of course not. A typical reaction is from MSNBC’s vaunted media guru, Brian Stelter. His apologia’s headline says it all: “Did the media botch the Biden age story? Asleep at the wheel? Complicit in a cover-up? The real story is more complicated — and more interesting.” Clearly, the media could not be honest even when their dishonesty was apparent to all.
When vaunted reporter Bob Woodward received undeniable evidence of Biden’s disturbing mental deficits in June 2023, clearly not a recent development, he refrained from publicizing his sources’ observations (which would have helped our country) so that he could instead monetize them in a bestseller, published only after Biden withdrew from the race.
The media did far more than hide Biden’s condition and thwart the Democrat primary process. They themselves became a big motive for the electorate to rebel against the conventional wisdom promulgated regarding Donald Trump. There can be no doubt that the partisan lawfare campaign against Trump, criminalizing political differences, can have caused its resonating backlash only if voters believed that the media were attempting to thereby “Watergate” Trump unfairly. Indeed, the Biden forces behind these charges would have made them only if they knew that the media would jump to magnify this thin gruel of questionable claims.
When the media rambled incessantly about Trump’s alleged criminality, they certainly provided talking points that cemented the opposition already disfavoring Trump. But to citizens of common sense, who do not wish to be told what to think, the media simply were revealing their true partisan colors. Most citizens are not so dumb as to fail to see through these weak charges, quickly realizing that snake oil was being sold to them. No one likes to be defrauded. No one wants to be insulted. And citizens who feel insulted and defrauded are highly motivated to vote.
The media could not be content with smearing Trump. Rather, they went so far as to shame his supporters. Not satisfied with Hillary Clinton’s slurring Trump-supporters as “deplorable,” the media in 2024 ratcheted up the defamation by comparing Trump and his supporters with Hitler and his Nazis. Three major left-leaning publications displayed covers with Trump’s countenance morphing into Hitler’s. Those attending a raucous, joyful Madison Square Garden rally were compared to Nazi enthusiasts at Nuremburg. As the New York Times put it, melodramatically, the voters gave “a permission slip” to an “authoritarian.”
The understandable gloating of Trump-supporters did not, interestingly, strongly focus on Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. There were numerous Trump voters, however, who delighted in the tearful recriminations of the televised media talking heads. Numerous Trump voters tuned in to The View just to watch the meltdown.
The media kept Biden on stage far beyond his shelf life. The media ridiculed Trump as Hitler. They falsely assured the country that Harris’s vacuous campaign was excellent, which served to convince her advisers that it needed no course correction. The Democrats, wishing future victories, will engage sincerely in soul-searching in hopes of improvement. But so long as the media do not act similarly, the Democrats will continue to deceive themselves in this postmortem.
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.
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