sorry but this is just wrong. yes, there’s a bad faith media feeding frenzy. but *fifty million* people watched Biden sputter his way through that debate. it is not a creation of the media, it is a real problem.
I don’t like to embrace doomerism but I’m pretty sure the moment we took on this narrative as a true “concern” Biden needed to disprove, especially party leadership, we were fucked.
the implied premise here is that the decline in Biden’s polling numbers is being driven by the media coverage rather than the debate itself. but several awful polls came in the days immediately following the debate. the debate itself was the problem
But that's really hard to disentangle from the center left elite media collectively freaking out and calling for Biden's withdrawal immediately after the debate.
More people will see a stream of out-of-context op ed headlines that they don't realize aren't actually news headlines (and also will not read) than watch the debate.
The net effect of how the Internet works now is that people will see 100 snippets of text or video saying people think Biden should drop out and just assume that's the conventional wisdom without really looking into it.
