President Biden’s shaky performance at the first presidential debate gave the Media Research Center all the excuse it needed to push its “liberal media” narrative, this time with the unproven conspiratorial twist that non-right-wing media deliberately hid Biden’s condition from the public. MRC writer Jorge Bonilla cranked out a series of posts framed around that narrative, complete with provocative all-caps headlines designed more for clickability and narrative reinforcement than for accuracy. A July 4 post carried the headline “UNDER SIEGE”:
The Regime Media continue their slow turn against President Joe Biden. In manners of both style and substance, previously sycophantic coverage has turned skeptical and borderline adversarial. Humiliated by their failure to report on what the American people plainly beheld, President Biden’s accelerating cognitive decline, the media are now scrambling to play catch-up.
[…]This, in a nutshell, is your thematic summary for today’s evening packages across the dial. The on-air talents made sure to note that Biden is meeting with the governors, that he met or had calls with senior Dem leadership on The Hill, and his statements of intent to remain in the race.
There was, of course, universal mention of Rep. Raul Grijalva’s call for Biden to step down. Each of these calls to step down will be reported as a drip, drip in order to create a preference cascade. It’ll be like singing “The 12 Days of Christmas”, but with names of dissenting Members of Congress.
But where things shift is that they also checked Biden on the reasons he proffered as underlying causes for his terrible debate performance: a cold, initially, and now also jet lag. Prior to the debate, this would have been covered very lightly, if at all. There were also mentions of the teleprompter Biden is reliant upon, and mentions of the brutal post-debate polling that has emerged.
[…]Coverage of the ongoing Biden saga has been revelatory. Democrats, with their mouths, continue to press fealty to Joe Biden. But the media that they whisper to are ready to play Paul Ryan to Biden’s grandma, per the old campaign commercials, and roll Biden off a cliff.
They would’ve already done so had they not gaslit the American public into thinking Biden was fit as a fiddle. As I’ve said repeatedly, Biden’s decline is the 2024 version of Hunter’s laptop: an inconvenient and devastating story that was suppressed or hidden from view because the media didn’t like the people advancing the story. In both cases, the right.
Bonilla failed to disclose that he and his employer are part of “the right” that seeks to gain political advantage from hammering on this story — or that the MRC was part of the “regime media” Bonilla now despises when Donald Trump was president.
Bonilla devoted a July 5 post to framing an interview Biden did with ABC’s George Stehanopoulos as an attempt to force Biden out of the race:
In the midst of this news vortex wherein the Regime Media want to rehabilitate their reputations after co-conspiring to hide President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline from the American public, we get tonight’s ABC News interview. George Stephanopoulos sitting down with Biden, hoping to create a moment that either saved the campaign or put it out of its misery. But tonight we got neither.
Think about it. Why else would ABC bump the full interview up to Friday night instead of its normally-scheduled Sunday except to gamble on Biden delivering a campaign-ending gaffe?
[…]The interview could most charitably be described as a “Goldilocks” interview. Stephanopoulos does just enough to appear to be questioning Biden while at the same time avoiding the appearance of a tongue bath. The entire interview had the tone of a familial intervention. The questions were certainly there, but the tone and delivery were more in line with an attempt to talk Grandpa into relocating to the assisted living facility after breaking his hip. And Biden reacted as Grandpa might, with resistance to the idea and slight outrage at even having to answer such questions.
[…]The post-interview panel came on and threw cold water upon the whole affair, citing D.C. Democrats as saying that the interview didn’t do enough to allay concerns, and Mary Bruce doing her level Mary Bruciest to cheerfully spin this disaster, but the die is cast: Biden is intent on hanging on as the media attempt to atone for 4 years of covering for him and, yes, hiding the decline.
Bonilla offered no evidence to back up his conspiracy theory that the ABC interview was designed to force Biden out.
Bonilla cited examples of Biden coverage to claim a “MIXED BAG” in a July 9 post:
The Regime Media find themselves in uncharted waters as they attempt to provide somewhat adversarial coverage to a Democrat White House. But as tonight’s reporting shows, they are still figuring out how to do that.
[…]This goes to show you that the media are still scrambling, trying to figure out precisely HOW to cover this ongoing slow-motion train wreck of whether or not Joe Biden stays on the ballot or in The White House before the election. And it is important to remember that the reason the media are scrambling now is because they got caught co-conspiring to hide, or looking the other way if we really want to be charitable, as the rest of the world saw Biden’s very obvious cognitive decline on full display.
Under the headline “RETREAT,” Bonilla complained in a July 10 post that the non-right-wing networks stopped sounding like Fox News on Biden:
After amplifying many of the calls for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential campaign in the wake of his disastrous debate performance, there appears to be a change of mind. After Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos and subsequent retrenchment, the networks have begun to fall back in line.
[…]ABC’s item on Biden focused mostly on his appearance before the NATO summit, with some time devoted to the RNC platform, Dr. Jill Biden’s own campaign call, with zero time devoted to the Walter Reed Parkinson’s specialist’s visits to The White House, which both CBS and NBC found time to cover. Like CBS, ABC covered the congressional fallout in a separate report.
Ed O’Keefe’s entry for CBS was more of a roundup. In addition to the NATO summit, O’Keefe’s report covered the Parkinson’s stuff, in addition to reaction from Speaker Mike Johnson, and some quotes from Vice President Kamala Harris’s Nevada stump speech. Congressional reaction was covered in a separate report.
NBC’s item filed by Gabe Gutierrez seemed the most comprehensive report, blending all the aforementioned matters with the tumultuous meetings held by House Democrats.
Viewed in sum, it appears that the networks are reverting to familiar patterns- a sign, perhaps, that the Biden debacle may be cooling down not that he’s retrenched. At least until the next debacle.
In all these posts, Bonilla failed to offer examples of coverage from Fox News, even though its right-wing, anti-Biden bias is the lens through which he prefers to view the world and what he and his co-workers are trying to bully the non-right-wing media into being.