Before 2008, the legacy media — while always leaning to the political left — had maintained a patina of objectivity. When Bill Clinton lied to the American people about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, they belatedly pounced. When John Kerry’s campaign began to crater, they reluctantly covered it. They were, to be sure, oriented against Republican candidates and policies. But they recognized that their credibility innately relied on the public’s perception that they could put their own biases aside long enough to report accurately even on those with whom they agreed.
Public trust in the media had been in a steady state of decline since the late 1990s — according to Gallup, 53 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media in 1997; in 2007, that number was 47 percent.
Then came Barack Obama. In 2008, the media, in its insistence that Barack Obama was a philosopher-king, decided to adhere to his version of the facts at every available instance. They ignored or downplayed stories that hurt Obama. They insisted that his biggest scandal was the wearing of a beige suit. Obama was simply too godlike a figure for them to resist. They became, for all intents and purposes, extensions of the Democratic White House. And public trust began to crater. In 2008, those who trusted the media dropped to 43 percent. In 2016, with the media’s abominable coverage of the Trump-Hillary race, the number dropped to 32 percent. It recovered slightly over the next five, but then began cratering again: to just 36 percent in 2021, 34 percent in 2022, 32 percent in 2023.
A consistent pattern of partisan coverage ate away at the media’s credibility, slowly and steadily.
Then came Joe Biden’s debate collapse last week. And now, all media credibility is gone.
Ernest Hemingway once described the process of going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The same is true of legacy media legitimacy. Legacy media lost the trust of the American people with its coverage of Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, Covid, transgenderism and the Hunter Biden laptop story. But they maintained some semblance of credibility by appealing to “new studies,” the “fog of war,” the difficulty of reporting an ever-evolving set of facts. When their lies were debunked and they were exposed they could simply claim they were just reporting based on the information they had at the time. They were just doing the hard work of Journalisming™ — just trusting the experts, who always slanted their political direction — and could continue congratulating each other for their brave and important work. Then came the Biden presidency.
Either Biden is senile or he is not. And it does not take an expert in Russian relations, systemic racism or Covid biology to tell the answer to that question. Any child could do it.
The Press and Biden Scandal
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