MRC Seizes On Special Counsel Report To Push Biden-Is-Senile Narrative

The Media Research Center — along with its former “news” division CNS — has exploited gaffes by President Biden to forward the right-wing narrative that he is suffering from “cognitive decline” and going senile. For instance, a November 2022 post by Curtis Houck, just before the midterm elections, complained that “the major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) refused to include amid the latest set of lies, gaffes, and examples of mental decline from President Biden amid their extensive midterms coverage on their morning and evening newscasts. This was despite the fact that the three networks each ran Biden soundbites from the events in which said errors were made.”

The MRC started advancing the narrative at the start of this year as the presidential election started heating up. A Jan. 22 post by Jorge Bonilla played Biden whataboutism to deflect from questions about Donald Trump’s seeming mental decline:

As the 2024 campaign heats up, a network’s evening newscast deems it appropriate to cover the president’s cognitive decline. Not the sitting president, though, but his predecessor.

Watch as ABC correspondent Rachel Scott hits a twofer by working two time-tested classics, “Republicans seize” and “Republicans pounce”, into her coverage of former President Donald Trump’s slip-up where he claimed Nikki Haley was in charge of Capitol security on January 6th:

[…]

In this case, ABC and Rachel Scott are “seizing” and “pouncing” at least as much as Haley does, if not more so. It’s been four years since Joe Biden returned to the national stage and, despite a litany of embarrassing gaffes, you’ve yet to see a drive-by story on his very obvious cognitive decline- even as the media do their level best to tiptoe around the issue of Biden’s age.

However, cognitive decline became a thing the second Trump blamed Haley, and not then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for the Capitol’s security failures on January 6th. Stories like these serve to remind us of what we’ve known to be true for a very long time: If it weren’t for double standards, there’d be no standards at all.

How ironic that a “media researcher” accused others of double standards while peddling one himself.

When special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s possession of classified documents included questionable claims about Biden’s mental health, the MRC was quick to embrace that tidbit to advance the narrative. Jorge Bonilla declared in a Feb. 9 post:

A funny thing happened on the way to wall-to-wall coverage of the Supreme Court hearing on Colorado’s decision to disqualify former President Donald Trump on 14th Amendment grounds: Special Counsel Robert Hur published his office’s report on the investigation of President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, and bedlam ensued.

Special counsel Robert Hur’s report bumped the Supreme Court hearing as the top story across the dial. Each of the networks differed slightly in their approaches, but ended up in the same place: using the report’s explosive comments on Biden’s mental acuity in order to distract from contradictions between Biden’s statements and the report, with a dash of “what about Trump”.

[…]

Always and at all times, as I’ve often said, the truest and purest victim of the news cycle on any given day is the electoral prospects of Joe Biden. Today was no different. Every report featured some type of reaction, either from the White House or the Biden campaign, to the age and mental acuity portions of the report. 

Bonilla served up the expected Trump deflections, insisting that the report’s statement that the classified documents Biden had included “highly sensitive intelligence” supposedly “demolished the narrative that Biden’s documents case is somehow different from Trump’s,” and that an alleged acknowledgment by Biden in 2017 that he had such documents also demolishes the narrative of this case somehow being different from Trump’s.” Bonilla is deliberately ignoring the fact that the main difference between the two cases is Trump’s repeated refusal to return the documents when asked, which necessitated the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

When Biden held a press conference to address the report, Nicholas Fondacaro rushed to frame it as a disaster while also engaging in some MRC-style Doocy-fluffing:

The spotlight was on President Biden’s failing mental faculties Thursday night following Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on the classified documents in his garage. The report declined to indict the President partially because investigators thought Biden’s failing memory would give a jury pause. And in a press conference to address the report, Biden lashed out at the special counsel and journalists like Fox News’s Peter Doocy and made multiple mental fumbles that only added evidence to the argument.

Instead of calling on pre-selected members of the White House press pool picked out by his staff, as usual, Biden opened the floor to questions after his remarks. The first journalist to jump in, without challenge, was Doocy.

Doocy wasted no time in grilling Biden on what the special counsel said about his poor memory and got an angry response for the effort:

Bonilla served up his own biased framing of the Biden presser: “Just how bad was this awful, no-good day for Joe Biden? CNN had no choice but to roll Daniel Dale out for a fact-check. Of Biden. That’s how bad.” For the next couple of days, the MRC continued to attack non-right-wing media for failing to be as hateful of Biden as its right-wing narratives dictate:

• PBS Dismisses Biden’s Documents, Memory With Yale Law Professor (Biden Donor!)
• ‘Who Among Us Hasn’t’ Confused Mexico/Egypt? Networks Defend Biden’s Blunder
• HUH? Mitchell Fears Media Being Unfair To Biden, Just Like Hillary In 2016
• CNN Hosts Defend Biden Gaffe THREE TIMES By Referencing Trump (Alex Christy defended Trump by insisting, “Yes, people who speak live and on camera make mistakes, but not everybody has a special prosecutor claim they are too forgetful to be convicted of hoarding classified documents. That is the difference between Trump, Johnson, and Biden.”)
• Sunny Hostin Hatches Plot: Ditch Mentally Failing Biden at Democratic Convention
• ‘It Can Only Help’: Sanders Tries To Spin Biden Gaffes as a Positive
• NewsBusters Podcast: The Hur Report Spurs Biden Fury Toward the Press
• ‘Mentally, He’s Quite Acute’: Biden’s Pathetic Presser Shames Former PBS Praise
• ‘Over The Line’: PBS Condemns ‘Gratuitous’ Hur Report On Biden’s Age
• Politico Skips Most Obvious Example of Biden Memory Loss at Press Conference

Bill D’Aostino contributed a Feb. 9 post insisting that failure to obsess over Biden’s alleged mental health the way right-wing media does is somehow a “left-wing corporate media” conspiracy:

Hell has frozen over, and some in the left-wing corporate media have finally begun to entertain the notion that our 81-year-old President might, in fact, have some cognitive issues. Now is as good a time as any to remind everyone of how desperate these same journalists were to dismiss that idea as a “right-wing” conspiracy theory cooked up by cynical Republicans and “Russian television,” until ten seconds ago.

In left-wing media land, where war is peace and the border is secure, Joe Biden has spent the last three years of his presidency wowing reporters with his stunning mental fitness. 

[…]

Even as recently as a few months ago, reporters were going on television to insist that Biden was actually in great mental shape. On September 6, 2023, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg remarked: “Mentally, he’s quite acute.”

Back in 2022 when he was still at CNN,then-White House correspondent John Harwood insisted: “The gears of his mind are working.”

[…]

Let’s not let the corporate media live this one down. For years, these hacks have been among the last few people on earth willing to accept that Joe Biden is, in fact, actually an old man. That isn’t something they should be able to just walk away from when it took this long for them to finally see reality. This should be the end of whatever tiny modicum of credibility they had left.

Are right-wing media outlets organized by corporations too? D’Agostino will never talk about how Fox News got caught repeatedly and deliberately lying to its viewers, let alone demand that it shouldn’t “live this one down” or insist that it be “the end of whatever tiny modicum of credibility they had left.”