Saturday, May 29, 2021

Biden Paper Trains the Press

It isn’t exactly news, but the Biden administration has been receiving fawning press coverage. The White House press corps has been completely corrupted. It is the propaganda arm of the Biden administration. One might express surprise at the complete absence of integrity, but at this point one is seriously beyond surprise. One is numb.

Anyway, Matt Taibbi, in a Substack column that is available only to subscribers, has coined the perfect metaphor for press coverage of the Biden administration. He declares that Biden has paper trained the press. 

Taibbi writes:

Joe Biden is cruising, in a happy-place few politicians reach. Outside of a few grumpy right-wing outlets he faces almost no hostile press questioning, political threats within his own party are minimal, and his approval rating, if one believes the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, hovers at an astonishing 64%.

Biden has the press paper-trained to a degree we haven’t seen in modern times. Not even at the height of the media’s drooling love affair with Barack Obama — a phenomenon I confess I was part of — did we ever see such enthusiastic, reflexive backing of White House messaging. The Biden press even reverses course on a dime when needed, with the past weeks being a supreme example.

For a time Biden echoed Obama’s claim and declared that his presidency was going to be transformative. But then, Biden stopped talking about being transformative, so the press did the same:

But all that’s happened is that the moment the Biden administration stopped talking about being “transformative,” the White House press quietly did the same, in silent recognition that they’ll all be selling a different product for a while.

Taibbi concludes that it was not just that Biden ran a good campaign. He had the full and complete backing of the press corps, a press corps that merely repeated his campaign talking points. And, let’s not forget the in kind campaign contributions made by social media, like Twitter:

One of the underreported stories of the 2020 race was that Biden’s handlers somehow ran quite a smart campaign, even as their candidate pooped his drawers and disintegrated mentally on an almost daily basis. They leaned into social media mockery of their candidate, realizing there was an untapped reservoir of Democrat voters who loathed the Twitter discourse far more than most reporters understood, then shifted in the general, and now are shifting back again. The effectiveness of their rhetorical approach has been astounding in its consistency, but there’s only so much credit to give. When you’ve got nothing but friends in the press gallery, everything works.


5 comments:

  1. Biden's good press is not the result of Biden's actions. To the contrary, Biden is a creation of the Democrat party/media conspiracy. He is their avatar, if you will. They excuse all his faux pas and foibles, his obvious mental deterioration and every other deficiency he exhibits because they installed him to execute their programs, goals and desires. The arrow of causation, in other words, points in the opposite direction from that expressed by Taibbi. The marionette does not control the marionettist; marionette Biden is controlled by his many masters, from Obama and Obama's crew to the CCP. His only spontaneous words and actions, i.e., when he strays off the prepared script are those that should, in a normal world, cause observers to blush with shame or cringe in embarrassment.

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  2. Biden doesn't HAVE to. As I've said before (though not here), the media are in bed with the Dems. And have been for years.

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  3. Is the media an arm of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration?....Or are the party and the administration really the creatures of the media? See my related post Comm Check:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/64898.html

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  4. I have said elsewhere, and possibly here, earlier, that I wonder if the Dems are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the media, or if it's the other way round, but it's OBVIOUS that they are in cahoots!

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  5. It's a "great minds" kind of night, I guess. I just mentioned Ashley Babbit twice in a comment, then went to "older" stories, and the first one up mentioned her in the...headline, I think it was....

    That sentence about "It's not JUST that he ran a great campaign" (paraphrase?) stopped me dead. What? How about "it's not that Biden ran a great campaign"?

    "Not 'just' that he ran a great campaign"....sounds awfully like, well, saying that "that's part, but not all of it."

    No. That wasn't even part of it. His so-called "campaign" was non-existent, and we all know it. That's the awesomeness of it for the corporate media and tech stooges; they stole the election with a candidate who was calling his opponent "George" and "Abraham Lincoln" (when he wasn't calling voters "dog-faced pony soldiers" and talking about "roaches" climbing onto his lap.)

    They see this as a payback, as if the American voters somehow "cheated" by voting for a pro-America president,who spoke blunt truth at two debates with an ill man trying not to stumble too often as he repeated stilted lines written for him by others... like that was a practical joke and now they are just "paying us back." (Obviously voting in our own interests is too "uppity" for our corporate overlords.)

    Well, that's not what happened. Our votes were not just surpressed, they were nullified. It's not EVEN that he ran a great campaign, not "It's not JUST that he ran a great campaign."

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