Being a good PR operation for the Trump campaign, the Media Research Center spent much of June 28, the day after the first presidential debate, obsessing over President Biden’s shaky performance while also complaining that Trump’s performance was also critiqued. It did more of that on June 29:
- Maher, Matthews Lament Dems Won’t Dump Biden For Newsom
- New York Times Post-Debate Whine: ‘Seizing’ Trump ‘Pounced’ With No CNN Rebuttal
- Ruhle Worried Biden’s ‘Weak Performance’ Covered Up Trump ‘Lies’
- New York Times Demands Biden Step Aside But Plan To Endorse Him Anyway
- Tax-Funded PBS: ‘Visibly Aging Man’ vs ‘Authoritarian-Leaning Convicted Felon’
But the MRC also smelled a highly partisan conspiracy — that the non-right-wing media conspired to hide Biden’s true condition from viewers. It has no evidence of that, but conspiracies must be fed. Jorge Bonilla devoted a June 29 post to rehashing something he wrote in February attacking the Spanish-language channel Univision, “where some of the anchors blatantly told their audience that Biden was fully fit for duty”:
The debate shattered the carefully constructed image of Joe Biden that was fed to Univision’s viewers over the course of the last four years. Viewers got to see for themselves what the network very carefully tried to hide, or at least paper over. The network, like everyone else in the Regime Media, is now scrambling to pick up the pieces of its credibility.
Jeffrey Lord spent his June 29 column praising the right-wing New York Post’s partisan attacks on Biden as somehow credible in hindsight:
Again, to remind, all of this is a full seven years after the Post noted that in 2017 “Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is not new, and it certainly wasn’t a secret.”
To sum up, the knowledge of Biden’s cognitive decline was available to the media. As The Post noted:
…Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is not new, and it certainly wasn’t a secret.
Jill Biden knew. His aides knew. Heck, James Clyburn, the entire Democratic establishment knew.
Indeed they all did know. And so too did the mainstream media. And they said – and did – nothing. Out there by himself was Fox’s Sean Hannity, who began to routinely note Biden’s cognitive struggles.
Now, of a sudden, as the result of a presidential debate in which Biden went off the tracks and illustrated in alarmingly vivid fashion that he is indeed seriously cognitively impaired – the mainstream media and their Democrat allies are demanding that Biden be replaced on the Democratic ticket.
Lord didn’t mention that the Post has such a reputation as a partisan outlet that anything it claims simply can’t be trusted on its face.
Clay Waters spent a June 30 post playing gotcha over PBS’ coverage of Biden: “From fretting about Biden’s age and infirmity in June 2022, to defending his mental acuity in September 2023, and now back to the truth only after the truth was plain to see on live television in June 2024.”
It wouldn’t be an official MRC conspiracy, of course, if Brent Bozell wasn’t loudly ranting about it at a right-wing outlet where he would never have to face questions that are even remotely challenging. Mark Levin’s Fox News show fulfilled that duty:
To discuss the aftermath of the disastrous Biden debate on Saturday night’s Life Liberty & Levin, Mark Levin said there was “no better guest: than Media Research Center “head muckety-muck” Brent Bozell.
Levin began by noting CNN and MSNBC and the rest mocked Fox News and the conservative media for “pouncing” on Biden’s feeble performances. Bozell said the media’s lying has been exposed:
BOZELL: As you saw the debate in progress, you sensed that the left was collapsing in shock at what they were looking at. But where conservatives were concerned, conservatives were just pointing at this and saying, this is what we’ve been saying all about this man. He’s old, he’s feeble, he’s falling apart, and he shouldn’t be president and leader of the free world.
The media are now in a panic because everything they thought about him, everything that we’re saying about him was false.
After discussing the younger, allegedly more charismatic options the Democrats have, from Vice President Kamala Harris to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Levin turned the attention back to the media and how these corporations “need to clean up their act…from the top down.”
Bozell went on to gush: “Donald Trump looked 30 years younger than Joe Biden and he was absolutely on his game. And I think that also helped expose Biden, who came up on the stage, was very frail and there was a very strong, confident, you know, president, former president who knew what he wanted to talk about and talked about it pretty easily.” That’s what counts as “media research” at the MRC.