Something is very wrong.
The public is losing faith in its institutions. What little faith is left is fast slipping.
From the military to medical scientists to religious leaders, confidence in our social establishments is collapsing. That’s according to recent data released by the Pew Research Center. Don’t blame the public, though. The trust implosion is mainly self-inflicted as major institutions continue to succumb to ideological capture.
With faith in such short supply, one would think that the press, the sole purpose of which is to serve as a dependable narrator of historical fact, would resolve to provide a still point in a turning world. But one would be wrong. Exceptionally wrong. This week alone should dispel that notion.
Take, for example, how certain press members responded on March 12 after the release of the transcripts of President Joe Biden’s and special counsel Robert Hur’s Oct. 8 and 9 interviews.
“Hur said Biden couldn’t recall when his son died,” the Associated Press reported. “The interview transcript is more complicated.”
It is not, in fact, more complicated.
The Hur report found that Biden mishandled classified intelligence. The report also warned that the president is too mentally incompetent to stand trial, stating that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Speaking of memory, the report noted explicitly that the president frequently struggled to recall important dates.
“[Biden] did not remember when he was vice president,” the report reads, “forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).”
It added, “[Biden] did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”
The White House has attempted to undercut the report’s findings, including holding an emergency press conference wherein the president accused Hur of bringing up the matter of Beau’s death.
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” an angry Biden demanded. “It wasn’t any of their damn business!”
But Hur didn’t “raise that,” as the now-released transcripts confirm. The president brought it up and then whiffed the dates. However, you’d never know this from following some of this week’s coverage.
“The President was fired up about Hur’s claim that he couldn’t remember when his son Beau died … because it was false,” declared CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang. “He immediately said the date, according to the interview transcript.”
This is far from being an accurate characterization of the conversation. Judge for yourself:
MR. HUR: So during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road, and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot, or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, um … I, I, I, I, I don’t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?
MR. HUR: Yes, sir.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except [President Obama]. I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that [Hillary Clinton] had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th —
MS. COTTON: 2015.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It was 2015.
MR. BAUER: Or I’m not sure the month, sir, but I think that was the year.
MR. KRICKBAUM: That’s right, Mr. President. It —
PRESIDENT BIDEN: And what’s happened in the meantime is that as — and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2016.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: ’16.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: ’16, 2016. All right. So — why do I have 2017 here?
MR. SISKEL: That’s when you left office, January of 2017.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Yeah, okay. But that’s when Trump gets sworn in then, January.
MR. SISKEL: Right.
R. BAUER: Right, correct.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Okay, yeah. And in 2017, Beau had passed …
Beau Biden died in 2015.
To recap, Biden struggled to remember the year that Donald Trump was elected president, he suggested incorrectly that he left the U.S. Senate in 2017 (he left the vice presidency), and, yes, he couldn’t remember the year his son died even after being reminded. Biden did remember the month and day.
But why get hung up on all of this? It’s “complicated,” says the Associated Press. Also, Hur’s claim that the president “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died” was “completely false,” says CBS’s chief White House correspondent.
Trust us. We’re from the press!
Elsewhere in the world of news media telling audiences to disregard the facts in favor of preferred narratives, NBC News went after “conservative influencers” this week for noticing Haiti has a cannibalism problem.
“Elon Musk and conservative influencers have spread unverified claims to millions,” reads a particularly distraught NBC News blurb, “smearing Haitian migrants as cannibals as they endure deep uncertainty about the future of their country and family members still there.”
However, NBC’s own report states in the fourth paragraph:
“The accusations of widespread cannibalism are based on what experts said was a likely intimidation tactic from select gang members: In some videos, the most prominent examples being at least two years old, alleged members of violent gangs in Haiti appear to bite into human flesh. Experts said these videos are likely part of propaganda campaigns designed to scare rivals and terrorize local Haitians rather than a reflection of common or normalized behavior. One former armed group went by the name ‘Cannibal Army.'”
NBC’s chief gripe isn’t that there’s widespread gang violence in Haiti or that the country’s already severely suffering population is being cowed into submission with threats of cannibalism. NBC’s chief gripe is that the “wrong” people have noticed something deeply wrong in Haiti.
Then, of course, there’s Florida, where the activists who sought to block the Parental Rights in Education law settled with the state this week in an agreement that leaves the 2022 legislation unchanged. The settlement proves that the law, which restricts the instruction of gender ideology and LGBT topics in K–12 public schools, has only ever concerned classroom instruction. It does not involve discussion, contrary to what so many in the press have alleged. Indeed, the settlement is a major embarrassment for the reporters and editors who accepted and promoted the activist-produced nickname for the law (“Don’t Say Gay”), which remains unchanged. Yet few, if any, of the journalists who helped mainstream the intentionally deceptive “Don’t Say Gay” nickname have questioned their role in misleading the public about what the law does and doesn’t do.
And let’s not forget Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who said this week that she regrets referring to the recent rise in inflation as merely “transitory.” Like the news organizations that have no regrets for adopting the term “Don’t Say Gay,” few, if any, of the newsmen and economists who claimed post-COVID inflation was “transitory” have made any effort to explain how they got it so wrong. Few, if any, have apologized for pushing the “transitory” line.
What are we doing here?
What role do these supposed newsmen and “experts” serve if not to keep audiences well informed? What is their purpose if they can’t clear even that basic bar? We have a genuine crisis of credibility and trust in this country, and the one industry that should be counted on to get the story straight is so bad at its job that it’s a genuine news event when it gets it right.
Sloppy media are not new. Biased or tilted news reporting is not new.
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What seems new, however, is what we see now: reporters demanding that you disregard the evidence directly in front of your face, readily and easily available evidence, and all in service of partisan narratives.
The stuff we saw this week is beyond mere biased reporting. It’s pure political propaganda. And if anything will accelerate our general descent into chaos and discord, it’s weaponized news media.
Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and the Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.
