News/Commentary

Biden tells biggest personal whopper yet; how can media live with dismissing and downplaying?

October 13, 2022 | | Print Article

Members of the establishment media are facing criticism over their unwillingness to brutally call out Democrat President Joe Biden’s lies just like they used to call out former President Donald Trump’s every lie, misstatement, and sometimes even fact.

Such as his latest lie that his late son Beau Biden “lost his life in Iraq”:

Everybody knows that his son died from cancer, yet as of Thursday morning, there were no fact-checks from Politico, The Washington Post, or CNN calling out this latest lie.

To be clear, it’s not that the media act as if Biden never lies. It’s that they downplay the lies almost as quirks versus as purposeful acts of deception.

Consider this soft headline from The New York Times: “Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel.”

Here meanwhile are some Times’ headlines about his predecessor, former Republican President Donald Trump:

  • “Dishonesty Has Defined the Trump Presidency. The Consequences Could Be Lasting.”
  • “Lie After Lie: Listen to How Trump Built His Alternate Reality”
  • “Rallies Are the Core of Trump’s Campaign, and a Font of Lies and Misinformation”

 

See the difference?

“Well, what if Trump just told a lot more lies than Biden?” you might ask.

But he didn’t tell more lies. It’s just that Biden’s lies receive far less coverage.

“He constantly lies with impunity and for no apparent reason. He said he finished at the top of his law school class. He finished near the bottom. He had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race due to plagiarism,” according to Joe Concha of Fox News.

“He keeps saying he was arrested during civil rights protests. He said he was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela. He insists inflation is at or near zero percent. He says we’re not in a recession. And he says the border is closed. Yet, fact-checkers either ignore the lies or try to defend them,” Concha added in a statement to Fox News.

Fact-check: TRUE.

“The reason he gets away with it is because, contrary to what Chris Cilizza once said, reporters do in fact root for a side,” GOP digital strategist Greg Price said to Fox News.

He referenced the infamous and quite false claim from Cilizza about how “reporters don’t root for a side, period.”

Take PolitiFact, the fact-checking project run by the Poynter Institute, which is supposed to be school journalism.

A study conducted earlier this year by the Media Research Center found that between Jan. 20th, 2021 and Jan. 19th, 2022, the president was fact-checked only 40 times, whereas his critics were fact-checked 230 times.

Fast-forward to the start of the month, when the MRC updated its previous study with new data showing that between Jan. 20th, 2022 and Sept. 19th, 2022, PolitiFact only fact-checked the president 18 times, whereas it fact-checked his critics 108 times.

This isn’t a coincidence.

Dovetailing back to the Times’ piece, it, to its credit, does detail a few of the president’s less appalling lies, including one about him losing his home to a fire.

“Standing in front of Floridians who had lost everything during Hurricane Ian, President Biden on Wednesday recalled his own house being nearly destroyed 15 years ago: ‘We didn’t lose our whole home, but lightning struck and we lost an awful lot of it,’ he said,” the report reads.

“Mr. Biden has mentioned the incident before, once saying that he knows what it’s like ‘having had a house burn down with my wife in it.’ In fact, news reports at the time called it little more than ‘a small fire that was contained to the kitchen’ and quoted the local Delaware fire chief as saying ‘the fire was under control in 20 minutes.'”

It’s good that the Times is calling the president out for this, albeit as gently as possible, but the problem is that the paper’s own supposed fact-checker, Linda Qiu, has never fact-checked this particular lie. Not once.

This too is no coincidence.

“Qiu is the paper’s designated ‘fact-checker.’ So, if Biden is habitually spinning yarns that unravel, she must be busy with Biden checks, right? No. She hasn’t ‘fact-checked’ Biden since Aug. 20, 2021, on the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco under an extremely mild headline: ‘Clarifying Biden’s Take of Evacuation,'” NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham notes.

“A peek at her archive of articles since then includes at least 14 ‘fact checks’ of Republicans and/or conservatives. This 14-to-1 imbalance in target selection would remind you of PolitiFact—which makes sense, because that’s where Qiu worked before joining the Times,” he adds.

The Times is by no means the only establishment outlet that’s downplayed the president’s blatant lies. So has The Washington Post.

“After four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims, the Joe Biden era has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard,” the left-wing paper declared only months into Biden’s presidency.

Spin, obfuscation, exaggeration? Really? That’s certainly one way to look at his lies.

Here’s another, courtesy of Fox News’ Deroy Murdoch: “Joe Biden frequently recounts stories about phantom Amtrak conductors, imaginary residential infernos, and baseball glory that he never achieved. Biden could invent these non-events to make himself look good. In that case, he is a pathological liar.”

Either that or he’s just nuts …

“But, even worse, maybe he really believes that these non-events actually took place. If so, then he is living a life of total fantasy. Liar or fabulist? The American people need neither in the White House. Joe Biden cannot be replaced as Commander-in-Chief soon enough,” Murdoch explained.

Vivek Saxena
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