Opinion Yes, There Was A Media Scandal In 2024. No, It Wasn't About Joe Biden.
By S.V. Date
Senior White House Correspondent, HuffPost
"The political press corps started ‘normalizing’ Trump just weeks after Jan. 6, 2021, to get access. That’s a big reason Trump later won, not some ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s age.
WASHINGTON — Early on in Donald Trump’s first term, a favorite riposte from right-wing accounts on social media to real and perceived cultural excesses from “The Left” was simply: “This is how we got Trump.”
Eight years later, we’re getting another round of this same clever retort, only this time the culprits are not progressive activists, but reporters who covered the Joe Biden White House. Apparently, we collectively conspired with Biden family members and aides to hide his worsening physical and mental condition from America.
It’s an amazing assertion, given that polls in early 2024 found that some 80% of Americans thought that Biden was too old to be president. Focus group participants said they were shocked he was even running again. It turns out that people drew their own conclusions from watching his halting public speeches and videos of his increasingly noticeable old-man’s shuffle.
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The great irony is that there absolutely was malfeasance by the media in its coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign — not in how it covered the sitting president, but in how it covered the challenger.
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And yet by late spring 2022, that is precisely what started happening. The political press corps began normalizing the hell out of Donald Trump. They downplayed or flat-out ignored the fundamental violence he had committed against our democracy in their coverage in return for the possibility of an interview or even just anonymous quotes from top advisers.
(Because, really, what kind of reporter are you if you can’t publish a few hours ahead of time whether Trump is going to call Gov. Ron DeSantis “Meatball Ron” or “Fat Ron” in his rally speech?)
Just as one example: Trump, unlike every other modern presidential nominee, refused to take a traveling press pool with him. Instead, he and his staff handpicked reporters for each trip. You can probably guess which reporters were invited and which ones weren’t.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-2024-media-scandal_n_6830d255e4b0ca4a5f568d82
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