It’s the kind of thing that regularly happens in Russia, China or North Korea.
When journalists stray too far above their totalitarian-controlled station and dare to hold their political leaders to any form of proper account, they get a visit or phone call from shady Government officials.
In the covert conversations, the errant journalists are informed that their entirely accurate and justified criticism is in fact totally wrong and unjustified, and the ‘truth’ is that everything is going fantastically well in the country thanks to the masterful leadership.
This message is polite and firm but not intimidating.
The journalists are left in no doubt there may be ‘unfortunate repercussions’ should they decide to resist the directive to ‘re-calibrate’ their coverage of the regime.
The United States allows journalists to criticize Governments without being threatened with death. They should not have to fear that their critics will be censored by government officials. Yet that’s exactly what’s been happening in the past week (Biden speaks alongside Vice President Kamala Harris during a press conference in the State Dining Room at the White House on November 6)
Of course, the usual consequence of these visits and calls is that the journalists fall back in line and start peddling utter bullsh*t about the glorious successes of the Great Leader which are doing so much to enrich the lives of their thankful people.
As a result, democracy is slowly dying as freedom of speech becomes more restricted.
In those despotic countries, I have some sympathy with the journalists because if they don’t do as they’re told and rein back on their critiques, it might cost them their lives like many of their co-workers over the years.
America isn’t a communist or totalitarian country.
It’s supposed to be the land of the free with a Constitution which ferociously protects freedom of speech and expression.
American journalists are free to express their opinions on Governments and not be afraid of death.
They should not have to fear that they might be lent to Government officials in order to curtail their critics.
Yet that’s exactly what’s been happening in the past week.
In a shocking report, CNN’s media correspondent Oliver Darcy revealed that three Biden administration officials – National Economic Council Deputy Directors David Kamin and Bharat Ramamurti, and Ports Envoy John Porcari – have been ‘briefing major newsrooms over the past week’ in an effort to persuade them to be more positive about the President.
Journalists, including TV news anchors, reporters and producers, were apparently told that contrary to their recent negative coverage, America’s in fantastic shape thanks to a booming economy.
In a shocking report, CNN’s media correspondent Oliver Darcy revealed that three Biden administration officials – National Economic Council Deputy Directors David Kamin and Bharat Ramamurti, and Ports Envoy John Porcari – have been ‘briefing major newsrooms over the past week’ in an effort to persuade them to be more positive about the President. John Porcari
Pictured left, is National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti (left) and National Economic Council Deputy Director David Kamin (right)
Darcy said the conversations were ‘productive’ which I think can be safely translated to mean the journalists have now seen the light and agreed to rethink their negativity. We’ll see in the coming months.
The mere existence of these conversations is absurd.
The lobbying followed an op-ed written by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank headlined: ‘The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.’
Milbank said he had grown so concerned by what he perceived to be unfair bias against Biden that he commissioned Forge.ai, a data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote, to look at 65 news websites of all political persuasions – many to the hard left, and right – and do a ‘sentiment analysis’ of 200,000 articles by searching for adjectives.
Milbank said the results established the media was indeed now treating Biden worse than it had Donald Trump and branded them a ‘tremendous indictment of the whole industry.’
He urged US journalists ‘to do soul searching and see what we are delivering to people’ and concluded: ‘My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.’
Unsurprisingly, Milbank’s piece received immediate public approval from Biden’s White House chief of staff Ron Klain who re-tweeted it with the words: ‘Submitted for your consideration’ as if it should win an award.
Milbank should have been shaken by this enthusiastic endorsement.
Any journalist is worth their salt if they want the Government to give them awards for sucking it up.
Milbank, however, was not deterred and he went on the airwaves again to support his theory. He also revealed the flaws in his argument.
He admitted to CNN that the media was actually more supportive of Biden than Trump’s August appearance.
Hmmm.
Journalists, including TV news anchors, reporters and producers, were apparently told that contrary to their recent negative coverage, America’s in fantastic shape thanks to a booming economy (Biden answers a question during his first press briefing in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 25)
Darcy said the conversations were ‘productive’ which I think can be safely translated to mean the journalists have now seen the light and agreed to rethink their negativity. We’ll see in the coming months. The mere existence of these conversations is absurd. The lobbying followed an op-ed written by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank headlined: ‘The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof. Here’s the proof.
What could it have been that turned media attention so negatively on the President’s behalf?
Ah, wait!
August marked the moment when the cowardly leader in the free world, the American president who abruptly retreated from the US military without warning, snatched millions of Afghan women and killed many Americans.
Next, he approved a botched drone strike in Kabul against a terrorist suspect. This tragically killed a family of 10, including children and women.
New mayhem broke out at the Southern border in September due to mixed messages from the Biden Administration. Americans watched with horror as US border guard horsemen charged into Haitian migrants. Shamefully, the President blamed his Guards and not him for the chaos.
In October, Biden tried to criminalize American parents who protested against their kids being taught woke agenda subjects like Critical Race Theory by encouraging the National Schools Board Association to disgracefully brand them ‘domestic terrorists.’
America came to a halt in the middle of the month with an enormous flotilla from cargo ships anchored off California and a constant shortage of food-delivery drivers that caused empty shelves all across the nation.
This was a direct consequence of Biden’s reckless desire to behave like an all-year-round Santa Claus with his massive Covid-19 stimulus spending spree that sparked the inflation that provoked this crisis.
The President’s decision to make it economically more profitable for Americans to remain at home over go to work led to a surge in prices, particularly at the fuel pumps. Wages stagnated and large swathes quit their jobs.
Milbank suggests that, far from Trump giving Biden a harder time over this, the majority of media went out to defend him.
The lobbying followed an op-ed written by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank headlined: ‘The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.’ Unsurprisingly, Milbank’s piece received immediate public approval from Biden’s White House chief of staff Ron Klain who re-tweeted (pictured) it with the words: ‘Submitted for your consideration’ as if it should win an award
They seem to be experts in these topics in an amazingly toned-deaf Washington Post op-ed piece columnist Micheline Maynard said everyone should STFU with their whining about food running out, arguing that ‘spoilt’ and ‘nightmare’ Americans have grown greedy with expectations of speedy service and easy access to consumer products – expectations that have now been ‘crushed like a Styrofoam container in a trash compactor.’
This bizarre response was similar in tone to Biden’s pathetic pass given by the US media after his latest debacles.
And it highlights the problem with Milbank’s theory: it’s all complete hogwash.
A.I. can be made. data studies ‘prove’ any theory you like when you base it on selective websites, many of which are at the extremities of news media, and trawl for damning ‘adjectives.’
And acclaimed pollster Nate Silver mocked the survey as ‘complete crap’, pointing out that many of the stories cited either had nothing directly to do with either man or were wrongly categorized because the adjective algorithm is totally misleading.
But I didn’t need him to tell me that.
I’ve been around the journalism block for nearly four decades now and I’ve never seen any US President get a worse or more sustained negative hammering from the media than Donald Trump.
Between the time he became president in 2016 and the day he retired, he endured a constant barrage of poisonous one-sided propaganda from numerous news outlets that tried absurdly to claim they were neutral.
While much of his criticism was justified, including his abject handling of Covid and his dangerous refusal to accept 2020’s results, which led to the horrible January 6th riots at Capitol, many of his remarks were just laughable nonsense.
The way the likes of CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times spent two years screaming 24/7 about ‘Russian Collusion’ – when, as Special Counsel Mueller found, no such collusion had happened – exposed their hyper-partisan bias and their obsession with trying to bring Trump down.
It is hard to imagine what could have caused the negative reaction in the media against President Obama. Wait, that’s right. The terrorist suspect was killed in Kabul by a botched drone attack. A vehicle with damage is located at the scene of an American airstrike on Kabul.
In October, Biden tried to criminalize American parents who protested against their kids being taught woke agenda subjects like Critical Race Theory by encouraging the National Schools Board Association to disgracefully brand them ‘domestic terrorists.’ (Elicia Brand leads a crowd of angry parents and community members in the singing of the Star Spangled Banner after a Loudoun County School Board meeting)
Joe Biden is not likely to have been subjected to this level of vicious negativity.
The truth is that the mainstream media has bent over backwards to help him – by blatantly suppressing damaging stories in the run-up to the election, like his troubled son Hunter’s laptop escapades, and since he won, by virtually ignoring Biden Senior’s increasingly obvious and disconcerting cognitive issues.
So for him to now moan about an unsupportive media and order his goons to ‘have a word’ with the offending journalists, is as ridiculous as it’s disgraceful.
My only complaint about Biden’s media coverage is that it hasn’t been anywhere negative enough given the parlous state of the country right now and his shambolic leading role in it.
Recall that Trump entered office with the promise to fix Covid and bring back democracy after Trump’s turbulent years. And make America one people can again trust.
Today, the US has just passed 50 million Covid cases and is surging towards a million deaths – both the highest numbers for any country in the world – and the new Omicron variant threatens to send much of the US back into tough restrictions.
It’s so easy to fix it!
As for restoring democratic values and trust, Biden’s unilateral decision to throw Afghanistan under the bus looks increasingly like one of the worst foreign policy calls by any US president in modern history and ensured nobody trusts him as far as they can throw him.
The reason for Biden’s dreadful approval ratings isn’t a negative media, it’s because his appalling actions have turned the public negative against him.
He fell asleep in the middle of the COPCC climate change summit last month and was woken up by an aide. This is a classic example of a president who seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel.
Wake Up, Mr Biden – and stop trying to bully the media into lying to the American people about how badly you’re doing.