Raymond J. de Souza: The American media's complicity in covering up Biden's mental feebleness

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Even for Donald Trump, it must have been surreal. The reality TV star was there in the biggest reality show of them all, a presidential debate, and reality TV was doing what it promises to deliver — humiliation and embarrassment for the loser. U.S. President Joe Biden was losing — not the debate as much as his dignity — and when it was over, his wife came to escort him off the set, just as “Apprentice” candidates would be ejected from Trump Tower.

It is apparently coming as news to some of America’s best and brightest that Biden is elderly. When he entered the Senate in 1973, it was only 28 years since FDR had died. Biden marinated in the Senate for 36 years, a mediocrity vain enough to imagine himself as president. Thirty-two years after he first ran for president, he made it, demonstrating that simply hanging around long enough, combined with not being Bernie Sanders and not being Donald Trump, will be enough to win the presidency.

Biden has yet to push the eject button on his re-election bid, but it is only a matter of days now. The issue has already gone from his manifest incapacity, the sad deterioration of age, to the high-combustion scandal of cover-up. Several senior people would have known about the president’s capacity and will have to account for their role in hiding it, starting, awkwardly, with Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Fifty years on from the denouement of Watergate, the lethal question has returned. In 1974 it was: What did the president know and when did he know it?

Today, it’s: When did the president not know, and when did you know that he didn’t know it?

Beyond the reverberations of that question, the infirmity of the president has highlighted how we know what we know, and that how we know might be the most determining influence on how we vote.

Perhaps the most important poll of this election year came out in late April. The NBC News poll found that Biden and Trump supporters are sharply divided by the media they consume.

Rely on newspapers to get your news? You are likely to favour Biden over Trump by a whopping 70 per cent to 21 per cent.

National network news? Still a blowout for Biden, 55-35.

News websites? Plenty of progressive voices there, and Biden remains up by 10, 49-39.

Then it shifts. Those who rely on social media favour Trump, 46-42.

Cable news watchers prefer Trump, 53-45.

If YouTube and Google are the primary sources, Trump prevails by a wide margin, 55-39.

And Trump hammers Biden amongst those who don’t follow political news at all, 53-27.

The immediate takeaway is that voters who rely on glancing impressions already knew that Biden was feeble; there are sites that have been pumping out short videos of his every stumble and stammer for years. Newspaper readers don’t have to confront video, and can be comforted by Biden-friendly reporters parroting presidential propaganda about his performance.

That’s why the most-informed people seemed most shocked at Biden’s poor performance. People who read explanations about the emperor’s new clothes can be convinced otherwise; those who only watch video of him already knew that he was naked.

If newspaper readers were the most prone to pretend about Biden, it was because newspaper writers were the most eager propagandists. The New York Times was so embarrassed to be exposed as covering for Biden for years that, post-debate, it published a scathing editorial demanding that he withdraw. Demonstrating the independent thinking for which the Gray Lady is known, all of its Biden-friendly columnists shifted course immediately. Thomas Friedman wept while watching Biden; whether they were tears of compassion or tears of contrition was not clear.

“It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable,” wrote Jill Abramson, executive editor of the Times from 2011 to 2014. “The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the president’s feebleness and his serious physical decline. Shame on the White House press corps for not (having) pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the president.”

The elite media have to answer for that. But the NBC poll points to something much broader. We are divided by our news sources.

Canadians saw it during the pandemic and most pointedly during the trucker convoy in Ottawa. Those who watched the network news were in a different information world from those who watched on social media, or alternative digital news sites.

If a similar poll was done in Canada, the same lopsided results vis-a-vis Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would almost certainly show up between those who read newspapers and those who follow social media. A newspaper will give Harjit Sajjan’s response to allegations of malfeasance in the Afghanistan withdrawal. A 12-second video will just make the accusation, accompanied by unflattering images. It may be, in this case, that the short video gets at the truth better. In other cases, that will not be the case.

The consequences are far-reaching. How we watch shapes what we know, what we think — and how we vote.

National Post