if you’re playing the wrong-rock game about Biden doing events at which he campaigns normally and demonstrates that he’s not senile, I kind of think the onus is on you to reassure people like me that you’re not going to wrong-rock Nominee Harris
what you want isn’t Nominee Harris. it’s a comfortable lead over Trump. the evidence that switching to Harris will produce that comfortable lead is nonexistent.
so reassure me that you’re not going to continue filling your drawers if you get what you say you want.
I fully believe that this media-led panic over Biden's fitness for office will simply shift over to Harris ... and there will be an equally frenzied media-led panic over *her* fitness & preparedness for office.
What way too many people are failing to understand is that this isn't REALLY about Biden's age & well-being; it's about the media being desperate to come up with something, anything!, to keep the focus away from the GOP's direct attack on our democracy. They don't want *that* to be the story.
Because if they admit that's the *real* story—the story of the century, even!—then they'd have to admit that they are playing a pivotal role in helping them successfully pull it off, and they will literally come up with ANYTHING to keep from ever holding themselves accountable like that.
Saw yesterday a WaPo guy I've often liked say that Biden's age is interesting because it's "unresolved" and impying that SCt making Trump the king somehow is resolved. An admission they can't think of any more stories to pursue about the latter b/c of total incompetence or malevolence imo
I used to think incompetence was the primary driver, but atm I'm leaning a lot more into the idea that this is malevolence. There's so much of this media-driven discourse that doesn't make any sense unless they're actively making these decisions *on purpose* because they want Trump to win.
Not only did the multimillionaire and billionaire owners of major media outlets benefit from Trump/GOP tax cuts, but their business interests benefited from increased readership and viewership from frightened audiences. And shallowly covering the Trump administration was dead easy, no work required
I mean, we’ve seen this play out with gore and lying, Kerry and flip flopping, clinton and emails, and now Biden and old. Excessive focus on the dem candidate and a perceived flaw, no way to prove that the dem candidate isn’t meeting that standard, every story framed through that one negative frame
the charitable version of this is that the rank-and-file reporters and columnists are being manipulated and are too stupid (or too attached to their jobs) to realize it.
l know that shouting “your employer is helping usher in fascism. how can you keep working for them?” is not totally fair, but after this week I find find it hard to maintain respect for the people who definitely know better but don’t really push back.
Yeah like I've lost a lot of respect for a batch of people that I thought wouldn't do this sort of half-enabling where they don't run the stories themselves but try to defend the coverage strategy with transparent rationalizations or misleading characterizations etc
They’re in their own echo chamber to a certain extent. Notice how many journalists who DON’T parrot the take of the moment seem to be leaving the large media outlets, whether voluntarily or otherwise.
I don't think they want Trump to win; I think they want to avoid a 55/40 Biden lead with 5% undecided, where we all tune out and stop subscribing or buying papers because we're not driven by panic.
(To be clear, this is much worse than being in the tank for Trump)
