Why was it a surprise? Biden’s debate problems leave some wondering if the press missed the story - eviltoast
  • retrospectology@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Easy question really; the press is no longer a check on our government, it’s largely there to pump out propaganda and studiously ignore anything that threatens the power of the elites classes.

    • worldwidewave@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I get this, and there are a lot of places pumping out low quality garbage that they just don’t care about.

      That being said, staying alive as a news business in 2024 seems extremely difficult. Google + Facebook have fucked around with your business model for a decade, stealing clicks away and aggregating titles and pages (like with AMP). And now AI’s going to fuck everything up, and could fundamentally change how we receive our information.

      I do empathize with people trying to report on what’s occurring in the world having to deal with all these larger struggles impacting their occupation.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      Yeah…

      I said it made him unfit for office.

      I thought I posted an article about it back then too, but I was thinking about this other time I was for holding people to a higher standard.

      Edit:

      https://lemmy.world/post/5526664?scrollToComments=true

      We can’t excuse shit from our own politicians, just because Republicans excuse it from theirs.

      I stand by what I said 10 months ago in that thread when someone besides Biden displayed the same symptoms:

      This didn’t happen overnight, if it’s this bad now then her judgement has been compromised for a long time.

      We need term limits, because once these (completely normal) mental changes start happening, the person will almost always react with aggression and refuse to ever step down.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 months ago

          Are you saying it made McConnell unfit but not Biden?

          Or that it made neither unfit for office?

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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          4 months ago

          Why are you arguing from the stance that Biden is the best path to beating trump when every indication is Biden will lose and Biden himself described it last night as a “coin toss”, said he’d be fine if he lost, and refused to answer if anyone else can beat Trump?

          And can you try to only reply to a comment once?

          • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            can you try to only reply to a comment once?

            if they have two distinct responses, why shouldn’t they leave two distinct comments?

              • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                whatever that means. if they used two separate accounts you wouldn’t even know. how about you just address or ignore each comment in it’s merits, and stop trying to control other people.

            • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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              4 months ago

              I’m saying you already lost

              Mate, the only result that I would consider as losing is a Republican president.

              The moderates aren’t going to pull a PUMA again, because there’s no way the DNC is nominating a progressive or even anyone besides Kamala.

              They’ll fall in line, progressives will give her the benefit of the doubt like we gave Biden last time.

              And regardless of what she’ll be like as a president and her abysmal favor ability numbers, trump is shit enough she can beat him. I don’t think Biden can, but if we’re stuck with him and he manages to pull it off, I’ll still count that as a win.

              Just like I don’t think Kamala is the best candidate to beat trump, or the best president. Standards are low and it’s not recent. I’ve literally spent decades just voting against Republicans, this shit ain’t new for progressives.

                • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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                  4 months ago

                  Lol just like everyone fell in line to vote for Hillary

                  She’s like the one example of an actual Dem.that would do worse than Biden…

                  And one of the main real complaints about her, was her refusal to listen to voters. The same thing Biden is doing now.

                  Kamala is a woman and a minority

                  Look, I’m not here to argue for Kamala. Personally I think she’ll be a bad president, and they’ll pull the same no primary shit in 2028 if she runs this year.

                  But at this point it’s just about beating trump.

                  I know people like videos more than articles these days, so check this out:

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jic_uL3-q4

                  It’s Cody Johnston, one of the OG Cracked editors from when Cracked was good.

                  He doesn’t want Kamala either, but he makes the most convincing argument that she can beat Trump. And realistically I don’t see the DNC picking anyone else.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Yeah they missed how everything Trump said was so unhinged he sounded like he hasn’t even been living on this planet. Also, what are “black jobs”, Mr Trump?

  • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    I’m not from the US, but I think senile alright guy is better than senile sumo hitler and the free press probably thought that as well.

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    The media didn’t miss a story, they actively colluded to hide it. Anyone pointing out Biden’s decline was a Fox news watching conspiracy theorist, or it was a deep fake.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldOP
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    4 months ago

    When “moderates” say there no time to question if Biden is up to it.

    Remember theyve literally been saying it for a fucking year now.

    Nearly a year ago, in August 2023, the Associated Press-NORC poll found that three-quarters of U.S. adults said that the 81-year-old Biden was too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president. AP-NORC found this February that six in 10 adults were “not very” or “not at all” confident that Biden had the mental capability to serve as president, although the sentiment was roughly the same for his 78-year-old Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

    When they say they just found out too, remember they’ve literally been hiding him from the public, literally a tenth of the the news conferences as the last D president.

    The 36 news conferences he had given through June 30 were fewer than any president in the same time frame since Ronald Reagan, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. Biden gave a total of 128 interviews, compared to Donald Trump’s 369 at the same stage of his presidency and 497 by Biden’s former boss, she said.

    • hypnoton@discuss.online
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      4 months ago

      It’s almost like the billionaire-owned media was busy manufacturing consent and it was going somewhat well for some time.

      I mean Biden has had a series of the senility moments caught on tape, but before the presidential debate the billionaire-owned media successfully manufactured consent by telling the voters to ignore their lying eyes. Not all the senior moments were equally bad, so plenty of plausible sounding excuses were generated.

      After the presidential debate the reality of Biden’s condition was so blatantly exposed, the consent-making machine panicked and started furiously backtracking.

      This situation isn’t a joke because a lot of the billionaires will be negatively affected once Trump becomes King in November. With his King powers Trump can make CNN and MSNBC cease to exist. CNN and MSNBC don’t give two hoots about journalism or about holding power to account (they’d have to hold their own billionaire owners to account then), but they do care massively about their own safety. They are scared now because they no longer believe Biden has a chance.

      And all this insanity happened because none of the players in this story trust the democratic process. None of them trust the American people. None of the involved players respect the voters. They all believe they know what’s best for us.

      If we had a real open and democratic primary none of this would be happening.

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The press didn’t miss it, they ignored it. Questions about his age have been dismissed or rejected since 2020, as though it’d somehow inappropriate to question the ability of an 80 year old to lead country. They never questioned why the President was doing so few unscripted appearances, or acknowledged some of his confused comments in press conferences. The pundit class even accused Jon Stewart of helping Trump for talking about this a few months ago.

    Now that the entire country watched him have a 90 minute senior moment, the press is finally forced to give his fitness the scrutiny it deserves. And the worst part is that liberals are have convinced themselves that the problem isn’t that the media never asked these questions, but that they’ve finally started asking these questions.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    4 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    “It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times, told the website Semafor this week.

    Throughout the campaign, Biden aides have pushed back aggressively on the notion that he had become diminished, and some supporters are angered by any attention the issue gets in comparison to stories about whether or not Trump tells the truth.

    Four reporters from the Times collaborated on a story, published Tuesday, that said several people who had encountered Biden behind closed doors noticed “he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.”

    The 36 news conferences he had given through June 30 were fewer than any president in the same time frame since Ronald Reagan, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project.

    Yet because the story, in a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, prominently quoted Republican House speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, it was dismissed by many at the time as being inspired by partisanship.

    “What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steadfast, fact-based reporting on the subject that began a couple of years ago as we documented Biden’s age-related challenges in multiple, industry-leading articles,” Kahn wrote.


    The original article contains 1,131 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!