Sorry for the clickbait headline, but it’s effectively what The NY Times has been doing for months — and on steroids after the debate.
They’ve been hammering President Biden on his age and his unpopularity since he announced he would seek a second term; the poor debate performance by President Biden gave them the excuse to flood the zone with editorials calling for Biden to step aside and for Democrats to find someone — anyone to replace him.
You know they are desperate to see Biden gone when they run an editorial calling for Kamala Harris to step up, given how they have also spent months disparaging the Vice President and repeating GOP talking points about her. They are also going out of their way to play up Democratic ‘panic’ and donors rethinking their support. Are they reporting news, or shaping it? The effects of constant repetition of a press narrative can’t be ignored.
There’s no disguising the fact that Biden managed to reinforce the negative claims about his mental and physical capabilities. If you look at a transcript of the debate and not the video, Biden did a far better job than Trump, who did nothing but lie and slander all night long. David Corn’s latest in his Our Land newsletter acknowledges this — but also cites Bill Clinton’s observation that “Strong and wrong beats weak and right.”
That being said, The NY Times and the rest of the media have been giving Trump a pass all along. Trump is also unpopular — he has never won the popular vote. We largely hear nothing but how strongly his base/cult supports him. Only the electoral college put him in the White House in 2016, along with “But her emails” and James Comey’s ‘help’. He gets a pass on his increasingly unhinged rants at his rallies; he was relatively disciplined at the debate if you can believe that. Trump is hardly the poster boy for mental or physical fitness either. Why he hasn’t had a coronary or a stroke is a mystery.
And there is no way the media should have allowed Trump to be treated as a legitimate candidate for any office after January 6 — but here we are.
Where were the editorials calling for Trump to withdraw from the race after he became a convicted felon? Why wasn’t the discovery of stolen top secret documents sitting in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago enough to get him sent into the oblivion he so richly deserves? Only corrupt Republican judges are keeping him out of jail at this point — which should be headline news but isn’t.
There’s one rare counterpoint in The NY Times today, and it comes from Stuart Stevens of the Lincoln Project: Democrats: Stop Panicking. (Full access link)
As a former Republican who spent decades pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party, I watch the current Democratic panic over President Biden’s debate performance with a mix of bafflement and nostalgia.
It’s baffling that so many Democrats are failing to rally around a wildly successful president after one bad night. But it does remind me of why Republicans defeated Democrats in so many races Republicans should have lost...
...Gov. Gavin Newsom of California showed Democrats how to fight after the debate: “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”
Unfortunately, for the moment, it’s much of the Democratic Party establishment. Many of the same people wrote off Mr. Biden in the 2020 Democratic primaries after he was crushed in Iowa and New Hampshire. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina refused to panic, stuck by Mr. Biden and helped save the campaign. Let his courage and steadiness be a model. My one plea to my new friends abandoning Mr. Biden is simple: Suck it up and fight. It’s not supposed to be easy.
emphasis added
Read the whole thing. If you want more to go on, Digby has collected some video clips of the two men following the debate. The difference is stark. That needs to be seen. The NY Times does have objections to a second Trump term — but they have a funny way of showing it. You would never know it from their headlines.
They have no problem with continuing attacks on Biden’s fitness to run for a second term, supposedly concerned he can’t beat Trump — yet they act like it’s not their job to spend comparable time on why Trump is a disaster in waiting, or comment on how corrupt and dangerous the Republican Party has become.
Dan Rather writing at “Steady” on Substack had this to say before the debate:
Coverage of the presidential candidates is disparate and dangerous
...The New York Times is a great journalistic enterprise, one of the world’s best. But how can we allow the normalization of Trump’s behavior? It should be called out. Every time. If Trump is barking at the moon, report it, broadcast it. News organizations may be tired of the craziness, but we voters are not.
If nothing else, being able to evaluate both men on a stage together at Thursday evening’s joint appearance will be a welcome relief from all the noise. One, or maybe both of them, could surprise us.
Well, we did get a surprise and not a good one — but Rather’s point about normalization of Trump’s behavior is even more apparent in the aftermath.
Have decades of Republican attacks on the ‘liberal media’ conditioned them into cowardice? Are they playing a double game, secretly working to support the conservative agenda as more in line with their own interests? Are they more terrified of a truly liberal agenda than they are of a descent into Christo-Fascism? Or are they just useful idiots, out-of-touch elites? Note that these choices are not mutually exclusive.
The NY Times is pushing the idea that President Biden’s duty to the country calls for him to step aside. Maureen Dowd, no spring chicken herself at 71, cites 79 year old James Carville who is pushing the idea that the best thing Biden could do for America is to announce on July 4 that he is withdrawing from the race.
Again — why is it they can’t make the same call — far more justified — for Trump to do the same if he truly wants to Make America Great Again? The hypocrisy, the double standard is huge.
We need above all to beware despair. We need to fight what could be called Yeat’s syndrome, where…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
If the press continues to keep giving Trump and the Republican Party a pass on their blatantly dangerous behavior, perhaps it’s time for Democrats to stop giving the press a pass on their journalistic malpractice.
UPDATE: Shorter Version - Why is it The NY Times feels free to tell Biden to step aside and the Democratic Party to find someone else to beat Trump (which they claim they want) — but they can’t simply tell Trump to go away and the GOP to find someone better?