The press does it because it works. How else can we explain Biden's low poll ratings? And let's be real. It's painfully obvious that the MSMs goal is to bring down Biden. The fact is he has done more in one year as president than most presidents in history yet every story the mainstream media covers about Biden is colored in negativity, a crises. Biden's covid crises - he's got more Americans vaccinated in a shorter amount of time than his critics said was possible. Biden doesn't have the votes for the infrastructure bill. He passed it. Biden's mess in Afghanistan - he successfully evacuated thousands of people in an unheard of amount of time getting us out of an endless war. On and on it goes. If anyone is paying attention, the press revealed just who they are by this latest obsession over Biden's remark in Poland. And to his credit, when confronted the next time, he didn't back down. Good for him. We have a president who understands just how damaging our mainstream press can be and instead of cowering, he fights back. He gets it. I hope most Americans do too.
Haha! I just saw a headline an hour ago on Fox that over 1 million illegal immigrants have “passed through” Biden’s border crisis. It’s just too stupid to even stick around and watch at this point.
My hope was that this biased press technique has gotten so extreme and ‘obvious’ that ‘THE PEOPLE’ would finally look past it… but don’t think it’s gonna happen… :/
Have to share this tweet on the state of / devolution of reporting from @KevinMKruse:
“There’s a clip in The American Experience doc on Nixon when reporters refuse to believe the administration’s spin about the 18 1/2 minute gap, rejecting its lies in real time. “Is that believable? Come on.”
Today it’d just be Chuck Todd saying “we’ll have to leave it there…”
But in fairness, is Todd really considered a reporter - or merely a teevee ‘host’. Big difference :/ Trouble is - does anyone care that there IS a difference nowadays?
Meanwhile, a Supreme Court Justice and his right-wing QAnon nut-job wife continue to actively and openly conspire with Trump and a cabal of corrupt Oligarchs, Kleptocrats, bought-and-paid-for politicians and convicted criminals to undermine the US government.
An actor bitch slaps a comedian on tv. A youtube of the event the next morning has 30 million views, compared to a rough average of a million or so of clips covering the news of that day. The press knows to whom they are selling their wares.
Is the gaffe obsession a narrative or a meme? Regardless, there is no doubt the Kool Kids of the DC media all agree that the gaffe horse must be ridden until it drops. Both NBC and ABC showed clips of their reporters' "tough questioning" of Biden about the alleged gaffe, complete with camera shots of the reporters' *deep concern* face as the President indulged the stupidity. "Couldda been an actor, but I wound up here. I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear." Don Henley nailed it in Dirty Laundry.
The Kool Kids even manufactured a Hillary gaffe by deliberately taking one sentence from a much longer statement she made in response to a question about what she would do to help the working class. Hillary talked about her $30 billion plan to help coal communities as an example and made it clear she did care about those people, saying:
“Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce energy that we relied on.”
The media chose to focus on just one sentence from that statement where she said we were going to take away coal jobs so they could falsely claim she didn’t care about working class people. Many later used that talking point to blame her for her loss.
It certainly was one of them. Personally I think the multiple investigations of the completely insane claim that the Clintons had their close friend Vince Foster murdered was another. The fact that one of our Supreme Court justices ran a Foster”murder” investigation for Ken Starr is especially disturbing.
The whole Ken Starr vendetta against the Clintons really was bizarre. He should have been disbarred for that witch-hunt alone. It was as insane as PizzaGate, and I cannot believe people not only fell for it, but built and expanded on it with even more batshit crazy schemes. Alas, karma got Starr in the end, but the media has devolved into clickbait driven infotainment at the expense of Democrats more every year since.
Jennifer Rubin gave it the press in her column yday w/same complaint about the ridiculous questions msm asked the prez demonstrating how shallow their reporting has become.
I believe the press would be better off either attempting to be completely factual and objective, with no spin, or explicitly partisan and admitting to that orientation, on either the right or the left. the muddy middle doesn't work, and they are rapidly losing the trust of the American people and beyond.
Thanks for the "Katie bar the door" phrase. I grew up hearing my Dad use it and I use it still.
Does anyone else perceive President Biden as very much shining with authority, clarity and firmness when he was in Europe? It seems he enjoys and excels at foreign affairs. And this bores the Press no end. Hence the obsession with gaffes.
Thank you for your work Eric. I cite you frequently in other comment threads.
Prez is doing a great job. You would never know it vis a vis the press and the polls. Dems/Biden are criticized for messaging problems while msm bashes him for small stuff and ignores the rest. How come his policies are popular but he’s not?? DUH 🙄.
And the MSM gives far more attention to inflation than it does to the strong growth of our GDP and number of jobs as well as the strong performance of the stock market. Polls show even people who say their own financial situation is good think we are in a recession. Other polls show that most people think the stock market is in the tank. The media refuses to take any blame.
Biden is very good with people, the exact opposite of Trump. He stepped confidently into the role of leading the opposition to Russia and has been highly successful - another thing the press doesn't want to talk about.
I'm not baffled at all. And I just finished reading a hit piece in WaPo about Hunter Biden and his alleged financial deals with China that took place when Joe was not in political office. I'm getting seriously fed up.
I wish I knew what could be done. I feel like one of those old people who rant and rave about how everything's going to hell but nobody listens. Maybe our schools aren't teaching critical thinking the way they should be. Seriously, I think what's behind a lot of the craziness and the lack of good journalism is laziness. People don't want to think. They want to be fed their viewpoints, if they have them at all. And it's been said that humans are not only herd animals who naturally follow others, but that they're hard wired for negativity and anger. I think the GOP's politics of grievance feeds on that. They channel the anger of white people, the one group in society that has nothing to be angry about, and convince them they're victims.
It definitely has a lot to do with how easily Trump picked up support and still has it - his formula still works. And lazy journalists still love how stories about the GOP are low hanging fruit. Imagine, a whole feature story in every news outlet about that little pissant Madison Cawthorn, who - gasp! - accused old GOP dudes of cocaine-fueled debauchery. It's infotainment. Making Joe Biden into a warmongerer over a single sentence is the same lazy journalism.
Me too! It’s hard being the most informed person in the room, and then having to endure the ignorance of those around me, who think they’re informed, but are only parroting Fox “News” talking points. I have learned to keep my mouth shut. It’s just not worth arguing with some of these people.
Removing critical thinking curriculums and focusing exclusively on test results are for sure one of the causes. Being spoon fed propaganda for two decades another.
An "impartial" economic contributor is not one who howls about deficits when Dems are in control but goes silent on them when Republicans are giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy.
I agree. I really don't understand the motivation behind normalizing these people. I mean this is the guy who admitted the quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine and told the press to "get over it".
““If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.””
So CBS is preparing for a Republican takeover by hiring dishonest right wing propagandists, making it more likely they will succeed? Despicable dereliction of their duty to inform the public!
Engineer the takeover and then claim you're only preparing for it.
Thanks media.
Btw, I have never understood the cycle of Republicans break something, Dems don't fix it fast enough, so voters give it back to Republicans to break some more.
When Chinese historians write about the collapse of the U.S. a couple of decades from now, they'll cite the unrelenting damage inflicted by the American media, stalwart in its refusal to think, learn, grow and understand its self-interest in a functioning democracy. And they'll laugh.
See BS is great! Let's start a betting pool. I'll start with $20 on Stephen Miller. He will be their go to on Dems doomed to lose because "what about the white people" script.
I couldn't find even one article with any in-depth discussion of Biden's speech, but that "gaffe" was everywhere. It got almost as much coverage as Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. It's all about the infotainment, and these two "stories" illustrate that sad fact perfectly. Two days ago WaPo had no less than six Will Smith slap articles posted on its website. Six.
And most egregiously, the story about those 7 1/2 hours missing from the WH call logs on Jan. 6th. Closest thing to a smoking gun yet, yet there was quite a bit of tepid coverage. Even WaPo's Greg Sargent opined that the missing pages in the call log could be nothing to be alarmed at. Just amazing - it's like they just don't want to cover it and are bending over backwards to give Trump a pass.
All morning on MSNBC the chryon has been "4+ million refugees have fled Ukraine", "President Biden to hold call with Zelenskyy", and "Putin advisers afraid to tell the truth". All of these headlines are newsworthy, but why has there been no pounding of the "trump asks Putin for election help" or "7 1/2 hour gap in WH call logs" stories?!?
I believe I can say with a certain amount of confidence that most, if not all of us knew that:
1. The press would find their spine again when a Democrat got in office. And:
2. All the trump liars would find a new life in the press.
Meanwhile, there’s a 71/2 hour gap in phone logs and 45 stole documents (and flushed others down the toilet) and ole Ashley Parker says “he’s not conventional”.
Great piece. Sad to say, yet another example of the media choosing not to inform but to misinform.
In any even middling functional democratic state, Putin would be either out of office if a parliamentary system or electorally toxic with checks and balances rendering him powerless. So, you know, Biden was correct. BTW, haven’t seen where Biden stated that NATO policy going forward was to effect regime change in Russia. Unless they’re going to fly Zelenskyy to wherever Putin is to blow him away, with footage to be recycled for the next season of “Servant of the People”.
As for CBS News’ new hire, being exposed to CBS News far too much, I cannot say it’s good let alone significantly better than Fox’s News side. So hiring Mulvaney isn’t much of a surprise. Sorry anyone stuck in the 70s. BTW: CBS News has been on the decline since the 80s.
Chris Wallace was recently on Colbert hawking his new show. He bizarrely blamed his dad for the sad state of our news media, saying it was the fact that because 60 Minutes was profitable the rest of the news media decided to stop being a public service and be profitable too. Funny but I clearly remember 60 Minutes doing hard hitting investigative reports about businesses and politics back in Mike Wallace’s day. No way he would have worked for Murdoch’s Fox “News”.
The bigger pattern is the mainstream moving hard right around the late 70s-early 80s.
Too, the lesson Fox taught is that there may be more profits in addressing a niche of specific beliefs.
And I’d say the mainstream’s ignoring the existential crisis the nation’s facing (in which they’re complicit) or the regime change delusion has nothing to do with Wallace’s theory. Not that I expect truth from any mainstream star.
While it is true that networks started demanding that their news divisions make a profit dropping their decades long practice of viewing the new division as a public service. What Chris Wallace doesn’t want to admit is that that change came after big corporations bought the network corporations. It had nothing to do with the success of 60 Minutes. If that was the cause 60 Minutes would still be doing hard hitting news stories exposing corporate and government corruption.
It’s a SNL positioning tactic: Just like Ford was clumsy in all their skits, Biden is gaffe-prone. It was not true then, but that was how Ford was branded and Biden will be.
It’s a powerful tool to culturally define someone, and it is odd that they had the chance to brand Trump as the ultimate liar (which would be true!) and they didn’t.
I do not know how much of this Biden-branding is the usual media laziness and how much it comes from the top, but it is strange that our entire Failed Political Press ™ has seized on this at the exact same moment, innit?
Biden gaffes are so much more fun to write about than 7 1/2 hour gaps or new “Russia if you are listening” pronouncements.
exactly !
Of course.
The press does it because it works. How else can we explain Biden's low poll ratings? And let's be real. It's painfully obvious that the MSMs goal is to bring down Biden. The fact is he has done more in one year as president than most presidents in history yet every story the mainstream media covers about Biden is colored in negativity, a crises. Biden's covid crises - he's got more Americans vaccinated in a shorter amount of time than his critics said was possible. Biden doesn't have the votes for the infrastructure bill. He passed it. Biden's mess in Afghanistan - he successfully evacuated thousands of people in an unheard of amount of time getting us out of an endless war. On and on it goes. If anyone is paying attention, the press revealed just who they are by this latest obsession over Biden's remark in Poland. And to his credit, when confronted the next time, he didn't back down. Good for him. We have a president who understands just how damaging our mainstream press can be and instead of cowering, he fights back. He gets it. I hope most Americans do too.
Even on MSNBC so much of the coverage throughout the day is doom & gloom.
Strange.
Exactly. Fox “News” is still trying to make “Biden’s Border Crisis” a thing.
I’m still waiting for the influx of “illegal immigrants”from the 2018 midterms to make their way around to my neighborhood.
Haha! I just saw a headline an hour ago on Fox that over 1 million illegal immigrants have “passed through” Biden’s border crisis. It’s just too stupid to even stick around and watch at this point.
My hope was that this biased press technique has gotten so extreme and ‘obvious’ that ‘THE PEOPLE’ would finally look past it… but don’t think it’s gonna happen… :/
!!!!!!! Couldn’t have said it any better
DITTO!
Have to share this tweet on the state of / devolution of reporting from @KevinMKruse:
“There’s a clip in The American Experience doc on Nixon when reporters refuse to believe the administration’s spin about the 18 1/2 minute gap, rejecting its lies in real time. “Is that believable? Come on.”
Today it’d just be Chuck Todd saying “we’ll have to leave it there…”
Classic Chuck Todd conclusion
But in fairness, is Todd really considered a reporter - or merely a teevee ‘host’. Big difference :/ Trouble is - does anyone care that there IS a difference nowadays?
Meanwhile, a Supreme Court Justice and his right-wing QAnon nut-job wife continue to actively and openly conspire with Trump and a cabal of corrupt Oligarchs, Kleptocrats, bought-and-paid-for politicians and convicted criminals to undermine the US government.
Yep. I don’t understand American media at all anymore. Their rightwing bias is just too open and blatant to even make excuses for at this point.
I think you understand the media perfectly.
An actor bitch slaps a comedian on tv. A youtube of the event the next morning has 30 million views, compared to a rough average of a million or so of clips covering the news of that day. The press knows to whom they are selling their wares.
And now the CCCP is amplifying the right wing liars defending the Traitor Thomases.
Is the gaffe obsession a narrative or a meme? Regardless, there is no doubt the Kool Kids of the DC media all agree that the gaffe horse must be ridden until it drops. Both NBC and ABC showed clips of their reporters' "tough questioning" of Biden about the alleged gaffe, complete with camera shots of the reporters' *deep concern* face as the President indulged the stupidity. "Couldda been an actor, but I wound up here. I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear." Don Henley nailed it in Dirty Laundry.
but only for GOP!
The Kool Kids even manufactured a Hillary gaffe by deliberately taking one sentence from a much longer statement she made in response to a question about what she would do to help the working class. Hillary talked about her $30 billion plan to help coal communities as an example and made it clear she did care about those people, saying:
“Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce energy that we relied on.”
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/15/16306158/hillary-clinton-hall-of-mirrors
The media chose to focus on just one sentence from that statement where she said we were going to take away coal jobs so they could falsely claim she didn’t care about working class people. Many later used that talking point to blame her for her loss.
Never forget or forgive what the Corporate Controlled Conservative Press did to Al Gore and they got away with it.
That really is the moment that led to where we are right now, isn’t it?
It certainly was one of them. Personally I think the multiple investigations of the completely insane claim that the Clintons had their close friend Vince Foster murdered was another. The fact that one of our Supreme Court justices ran a Foster”murder” investigation for Ken Starr is especially disturbing.
The whole Ken Starr vendetta against the Clintons really was bizarre. He should have been disbarred for that witch-hunt alone. It was as insane as PizzaGate, and I cannot believe people not only fell for it, but built and expanded on it with even more batshit crazy schemes. Alas, karma got Starr in the end, but the media has devolved into clickbait driven infotainment at the expense of Democrats more every year since.
Goodness, yes. The seeds were definitely planted then.
Biden is handling it brilliantly by leaning into it and not backing down. He is right. He knows he is right. And his honesty resonates with people.
It's really sicking just how smug these reporters are. So full of themselves.
they think they’re being so clever asking same Q over and over
Jennifer Rubin gave it the press in her column yday w/same complaint about the ridiculous questions msm asked the prez demonstrating how shallow their reporting has become.
‘Tough on gaffes!’…😒
Hahaha! They really do take themselves way too seriously.
I believe the press would be better off either attempting to be completely factual and objective, with no spin, or explicitly partisan and admitting to that orientation, on either the right or the left. the muddy middle doesn't work, and they are rapidly losing the trust of the American people and beyond.
agreed. the mushy middle is a problem
Thanks for the "Katie bar the door" phrase. I grew up hearing my Dad use it and I use it still.
Does anyone else perceive President Biden as very much shining with authority, clarity and firmness when he was in Europe? It seems he enjoys and excels at foreign affairs. And this bores the Press no end. Hence the obsession with gaffes.
Thank you for your work Eric. I cite you frequently in other comment threads.
Prez is doing a great job. You would never know it vis a vis the press and the polls. Dems/Biden are criticized for messaging problems while msm bashes him for small stuff and ignores the rest. How come his policies are popular but he’s not?? DUH 🙄.
And the MSM gives far more attention to inflation than it does to the strong growth of our GDP and number of jobs as well as the strong performance of the stock market. Polls show even people who say their own financial situation is good think we are in a recession. Other polls show that most people think the stock market is in the tank. The media refuses to take any blame.
His recent trip was a stunning success!!!…
But his gaffe ….
🦗🦗🦗
So we’re back in Afgh evacuation mode :/
Biden is very good with people, the exact opposite of Trump. He stepped confidently into the role of leading the opposition to Russia and has been highly successful - another thing the press doesn't want to talk about.
No they don't. I remain baffled by the press. And disappointed.
I'm not baffled at all. And I just finished reading a hit piece in WaPo about Hunter Biden and his alleged financial deals with China that took place when Joe was not in political office. I'm getting seriously fed up.
I have been fed up for years. There has to be a way to make it stop.
I wish I knew what could be done. I feel like one of those old people who rant and rave about how everything's going to hell but nobody listens. Maybe our schools aren't teaching critical thinking the way they should be. Seriously, I think what's behind a lot of the craziness and the lack of good journalism is laziness. People don't want to think. They want to be fed their viewpoints, if they have them at all. And it's been said that humans are not only herd animals who naturally follow others, but that they're hard wired for negativity and anger. I think the GOP's politics of grievance feeds on that. They channel the anger of white people, the one group in society that has nothing to be angry about, and convince them they're victims.
It definitely has a lot to do with how easily Trump picked up support and still has it - his formula still works. And lazy journalists still love how stories about the GOP are low hanging fruit. Imagine, a whole feature story in every news outlet about that little pissant Madison Cawthorn, who - gasp! - accused old GOP dudes of cocaine-fueled debauchery. It's infotainment. Making Joe Biden into a warmongerer over a single sentence is the same lazy journalism.
Me too! It’s hard being the most informed person in the room, and then having to endure the ignorance of those around me, who think they’re informed, but are only parroting Fox “News” talking points. I have learned to keep my mouth shut. It’s just not worth arguing with some of these people.
Removing critical thinking curriculums and focusing exclusively on test results are for sure one of the causes. Being spoon fed propaganda for two decades another.
Beltway Political Propaganda Complex is definitely lazy. I don't think they're very bright either.
An "impartial" economic contributor is not one who howls about deficits when Dems are in control but goes silent on them when Republicans are giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy.
awful move by CBS
I agree. I really don't understand the motivation behind normalizing these people. I mean this is the guy who admitted the quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine and told the press to "get over it".
Now we know the motivation — access!
““If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.””
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/03/30/cbs-mulvaney-backlash/
What
So CBS is preparing for a Republican takeover by hiring dishonest right wing propagandists, making it more likely they will succeed? Despicable dereliction of their duty to inform the public!
Engineer the takeover and then claim you're only preparing for it.
Thanks media.
Btw, I have never understood the cycle of Republicans break something, Dems don't fix it fast enough, so voters give it back to Republicans to break some more.
Right… don’t even bother to connect a couple dots - no wonder they’re (MSM) emboldened…(if that’s the right word :/)
GEEZus
Doubling down worked so well - we triple/quadruple down now :)!
What are they thinking?
When Chinese historians write about the collapse of the U.S. a couple of decades from now, they'll cite the unrelenting damage inflicted by the American media, stalwart in its refusal to think, learn, grow and understand its self-interest in a functioning democracy. And they'll laugh.
Ah the spirit of Les Moonves is still alive and well at See B.S.
Just wondering who their next hire will be after Slick Mulvaney...
See B.S. I’m using that from here on out.
See BS is great! Let's start a betting pool. I'll start with $20 on Stephen Miller. He will be their go to on Dems doomed to lose because "what about the white people" script.
I couldn't find even one article with any in-depth discussion of Biden's speech, but that "gaffe" was everywhere. It got almost as much coverage as Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. It's all about the infotainment, and these two "stories" illustrate that sad fact perfectly. Two days ago WaPo had no less than six Will Smith slap articles posted on its website. Six.
And accidentally pushing the Thomas story off center stage… oops?! Right :)
And most egregiously, the story about those 7 1/2 hours missing from the WH call logs on Jan. 6th. Closest thing to a smoking gun yet, yet there was quite a bit of tepid coverage. Even WaPo's Greg Sargent opined that the missing pages in the call log could be nothing to be alarmed at. Just amazing - it's like they just don't want to cover it and are bending over backwards to give Trump a pass.
All morning on MSNBC the chryon has been "4+ million refugees have fled Ukraine", "President Biden to hold call with Zelenskyy", and "Putin advisers afraid to tell the truth". All of these headlines are newsworthy, but why has there been no pounding of the "trump asks Putin for election help" or "7 1/2 hour gap in WH call logs" stories?!?
I believe I can say with a certain amount of confidence that most, if not all of us knew that:
1. The press would find their spine again when a Democrat got in office. And:
2. All the trump liars would find a new life in the press.
Meanwhile, there’s a 71/2 hour gap in phone logs and 45 stole documents (and flushed others down the toilet) and ole Ashley Parker says “he’s not conventional”.
Way to bury the bar there. Amazing
She also gushed when he wore a mask.
Great piece. Sad to say, yet another example of the media choosing not to inform but to misinform.
In any even middling functional democratic state, Putin would be either out of office if a parliamentary system or electorally toxic with checks and balances rendering him powerless. So, you know, Biden was correct. BTW, haven’t seen where Biden stated that NATO policy going forward was to effect regime change in Russia. Unless they’re going to fly Zelenskyy to wherever Putin is to blow him away, with footage to be recycled for the next season of “Servant of the People”.
As for CBS News’ new hire, being exposed to CBS News far too much, I cannot say it’s good let alone significantly better than Fox’s News side. So hiring Mulvaney isn’t much of a surprise. Sorry anyone stuck in the 70s. BTW: CBS News has been on the decline since the 80s.
Chris Wallace was recently on Colbert hawking his new show. He bizarrely blamed his dad for the sad state of our news media, saying it was the fact that because 60 Minutes was profitable the rest of the news media decided to stop being a public service and be profitable too. Funny but I clearly remember 60 Minutes doing hard hitting investigative reports about businesses and politics back in Mike Wallace’s day. No way he would have worked for Murdoch’s Fox “News”.
Good theory but…
The bigger pattern is the mainstream moving hard right around the late 70s-early 80s.
Too, the lesson Fox taught is that there may be more profits in addressing a niche of specific beliefs.
And I’d say the mainstream’s ignoring the existential crisis the nation’s facing (in which they’re complicit) or the regime change delusion has nothing to do with Wallace’s theory. Not that I expect truth from any mainstream star.
While it is true that networks started demanding that their news divisions make a profit dropping their decades long practice of viewing the new division as a public service. What Chris Wallace doesn’t want to admit is that that change came after big corporations bought the network corporations. It had nothing to do with the success of 60 Minutes. If that was the cause 60 Minutes would still be doing hard hitting news stories exposing corporate and government corruption.
Cronkite is spinning 😵💫
It’s a SNL positioning tactic: Just like Ford was clumsy in all their skits, Biden is gaffe-prone. It was not true then, but that was how Ford was branded and Biden will be.
It’s a powerful tool to culturally define someone, and it is odd that they had the chance to brand Trump as the ultimate liar (which would be true!) and they didn’t.
I do not know how much of this Biden-branding is the usual media laziness and how much it comes from the top, but it is strange that our entire Failed Political Press ™ has seized on this at the exact same moment, innit?