Media Bias, Against Biden

  • More people are noticing the main stream media’s bias against Biden, while giving Trump a pass, since his interminable lying is old news: Robert Reich, Connie Willis, Heather Cox Richardson;
  • With an aside graphic of the goals of Project 2025;
  • While the Philadelphia Inquirer is an outlier in challenging Trump over Biden;
  • And some discussion of cognitive tests, with an online example of one that provides immediate (free) feedback.

For all that many people accuse the mass media of being biased toward the left, that’s not always the case.

Robert Reich, 5 Jul 2024: The Pile-on

Joe Biden is being treated far worse than Donald Trump by the two institutions critical for deciding the outcome of the 2024 election: the political parties and the media.

The Republican Party has closed ranks around Trump — despite the fact he’s a convicted felon, twice-impeached con man, sexual abuser, fraudulent businessman, self-described aspiring dictator for a day, pathological liar, and ringleader of an attempted coup against the United States.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is in a panic about Biden. Many party insiders are trying to force Biden out now, at the last minute, because he had a bad debate performance.


[The media] has normalized Trump’s nonstop lies during the debate as “old news.” Rather than treat those lies as further evidence of his proven dishonesty and criminality — and emphasize that another term with him at the helm will ruin the country — the media has focused on Biden’s halting speech and vacant gaze as evidence he’s incapable of running the country.

Almost every member of the chattering class says Biden must go. None says Trump must go.

I suspect this is not conscious bias but rather, ironically, an artifact of the nature of the “news.” If an ongoing catastrophe has been underway steadily for years, it gets tiresome to keep mentioning it every day, or even every week. Matters more immediate, even if ultimately insignificant, get the lead stories instead.

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Similarly is this recent daily screed from Connie Willis, via Lou Anders on Facebook.

Facebook, Lou Anders, 5 Jul 2024: Hard to read and vitally important

CONNIE WILLIS
July 5
Trump and the Epstein Documents

Dear Everybody:

The media is continuing their attempt to drive Biden out of the race, and it’s looking more and more like a manufactured effort by people who want to put Trump in office:

— They’re publishing rumors, planting strategic leads, and now, just plain making stuff up.

— The so-called letter from 25 Representatives and Senators turned out to be a rumor from a very low-level aide, and a letter has never appeared.

— The New York Times published an op-ed urging people not to vote, then when that got blow-back, changed the title, and finally removed it.

— They also reported that Abigail Disney (the heir to the Disney fortune) was withholding all her donations till Biden steps down. They made it sound like she was a BIG donor, but then we find out she was talking about the maximum a person can donate, which is $3300. (I know because I had to look it up for my own donations.)

— Worst of all, the Washington Post yesterday printed a “fantasy” letter from Biden, imagining him stepping down, and even worse, forcing Kamala Harris to step aside so that the delegates at the convention could nominate somebody else. It was presented so it looked like the real thing.

It goes on an on. (How does Connie have the time to compile this much, every day?)

— Trump is very happy about what the media’s doing to Biden. He was caught on a hot mic (while out golfing) saying, “I got him out of the…and that means we have Kamala…Biden’s a broken-down piece of crap…(Kamala’s) so bad; she’s pathetic.”

— And none of them are covering the fact that Biden’s been out there making appearances and doing interviews, but Trump has been in hiding for the last several days. But there’s finally starting to be some significant push-back…

Actually the Trump quote I saw elsewhere used the f-word regarding Kamala.

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And Heather Cox Richardson:

Letters from an American, 6 Jul 2024: July 5, 2024 (Friday):

For all that certain members of the media continue their freakout over Biden’s electability after his appearance in last Thursday’s event on CNN, it is Trump and his Republicans who appear to be nervous about the upcoming election.

Journalist Jennifer Schulze of Heartland Signal noted today that as of 8:00 this morning, the New York Times had published 192 pieces on Biden’s debate performance: 142 news articles and 50 opinion pieces. Trump was covered in 92 stories, about half of which were about the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Although Trump has frequently slurred his words or trailed off while speaking and repeatedly fell asleep at his own criminal trial, none of the pieces mentioned Trump’s mental fitness.

But for all of what independent journalists are calling a “feeding frenzy,” egged on by right-wing media figures, it seems as if the true implications of Project 2025 are starting to gain traction and the Trump campaign recognizes that the policies that document advocates are hugely unpopular.

Aside: Boing Boing has A list of the terrible things Project 2025 has in store for us, a graphic that has floated around the internet, so I’ll link it here too.

Pure MAGA: return the US to the state of the 1950s, when white Christian men ruled and everyone else was a second or third class citizen, if they were legal at all. And never mind global problems that would threaten corporate profits.

Back to Heather, who notes that Trump has claimed “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

She ends with another example of media bias against Biden:

Tonight, George Stephanopoulos of ABC interviewed Biden without a teleprompter or notes, focusing only on Biden’s age without any questions about policy. ABC News posted the interview transcript with the president’s conversation portrayed with the “g”s dropped off the words and with other colloquial pronunciations spelled out, as if it were dialect. Trump, whose words the press tends to turn into clean prose, has refused to do an interview under the same conditions.

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And a few among the mass media are challenging the trend.

Philadelphia Inquirer, via JMG, 7 Jul 2024: Philly Paper: Focus On Trump Lies, Not Biden’s Gaffes

Little attention has been paid to Trump’s incoherent debate performance because he is often incoherent. Trump told more than 30 lies in 90 minutes during the debate like it was another day at the office. In discussing abortion, he falsely claimed Democrats want to execute babies in the ninth month of pregnancy. Trump also claimed migrants were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” — whatever that means.

During a discussion about the environment, Trump — who rolled back more than 100 regulations and withdrew from the Paris climate agreement — said: “we had H2O, we had the best numbers ever.” Huh? Then Trump added to the lie: “I had the best environmental numbers ever, and my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.”

Apparently, it’s OK for Trump to spew nonstop nonsense, but Biden can’t ever lose his train of thought. Anyone looking for cognitive decline should tune into a Trump rally.

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Speaking of cognitive tests. Trump has, over the years, spoken of “acing” such tests, without ever specifying what test it was that he took. (Speculation is that it was some very simple one, to detect nothing more than dementia.) And then Biden, in his ABC interview the other night, declined the challenge to take a cognitive test, saying he passes such tests every day just by doing his job. Well, maybe.

I did some searching for online sample cognitive tests. The gold standard seems to be the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, but it’s only accessible to professional. Several others, I discovered, even when nominally free, require you to register at the end, to get your results. I did find this one that provides immediate feedback on your answers to 20 questions. These are very much like the IQ tests you might have taken back in high school, with one sample in the above graphic.

JobTestPrep: Cognitive Ability Test – Prepare with Free Practice Cognitive Questions & Tips

I missed two. (With #2, because the relationship between the first two numbers is arbitrary. I looked too hard for the pattern.)

If Trump really “aced” a test like this, it would mean he is capable of exercising reason. And then doesn’t. Because, as evidenced from their policies and their actions, conservatives don’t do reason. They do ideology, and loyalty. Not reason, logic, or reality.

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