It’s rare today to see a major media outlet have anything critical to say of anything, anyone, or any practice in the media itself. While the news business has always been clubby, it did not used to march in absolute political lockstep. But it has done so most obviously since at least 2016 with the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency.
The New York Post has started off the year with a bang in a long overdue excoriation of the craven lying of basically all of the press regarding President Joe Biden’s obvious senility. It’s not surprising that it’s the Post taking the issue on, as that paper has every reason to be critical of its colleagues and competitors. The New York Post is America’s oldest newspaper, and it was the paper that broke the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Hunter, the president’s son, abandoned a laptop at a computer repair shop in Maryland. Predictably, the contents leaked, and what contents they were. There was evidence that Hunter and his father Joe were engaged in unsavory, unethical, and possibly illegal dealings with Ukrainian businesses like the energy company Burisma. Not only that, but the computer was full of prurient photos depicting Hunter Biden smoking hard drugs and consorting with what appeared to be prostitutes.
The All-Democrat-All-The-Time mainstream media either ignored the story, or accused the Post of making the whole thing up. Under its pre-Elon-Musk ownership, Twitter banned the New York Post’s account entirely, preventing it from posting anything on the platform. All this was a far cry from the heroic narrative about the hard-hitting independent press that has lingered on since the days of the Watergate scandal depicted in All the President’s Men.
Now the Post strikes back. In a blistering editorial, the editorial board accuses its media colleagues of exactly what they did: “President-elect Donald Trump is forcing the Democratic politicians who spent years lying about President Biden’s senility to take their bitter medicine, but we’re more concerned about the toady media who played along . . . Every last [Democrat who covered it up] deserves scorn, but so do the journalists who not only let these fantastical fibs go unchallenged, but even parroted the lies: Biden was showing no signs of mental decline, they insisted — and it was offensive, ignorant and borderline bigoted to even suggest otherwise.”
What’s so infuriating about the press trying to hide Biden’s senility was that everyone could see it. Despite what your Democrat aunt might claim, and despite what talking heads on television claimed, no adult American of ordinary intelligence could not see that Joe Biden has been in dementia for years.
The New York Post points out, “The entire idea that Biden was anything but healthy — virile, even — was treated as a right-wing, tin-foil-hat talking point.The public wasn’t buying it: Back in February, 86% of Americans thought Biden was too old to serve a second term because they had watched his decline happen in real time, and over the course of several years.”
It’s hard to recollect a time in living memory when the entire press apparatus lied about the most obvious deficiencies in the leader of the free world, and tried to tell sane Americans that it was they who were losing their minds for noticing the truth.
The public is beyond fed up. Here’s a sampling from X/Twitter under a Fox News post about the topic. Fox framed it as the media “being in denial,” and the public isn’t letting them get away with it.
