As presumptive nominees Donald Trump and Joe Biden received the expected and overwhelming majorities in a series of anticlimactic primaries on Tuesday – in Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, and Florida – apparently, the permission concept has taken hold in big corporate media’s coverage of the 2024 presidential election. Once the leaders of the band, those famous left-wing newspapers in Washington and New York, decided they would no longer ignore the peril facing Joe Biden in his bid for a second term, mainstream coverage of the Biden campaign has steered toward something we would not have expected to see: actual journalism. It’s a stark contrast from the “what flavor ice cream?” coverage of Biden in 2020, when the media was in full see-no-evil, speak-no-evil autopilot on behalf of Biden.
A Return to Credibility?
Now, let’s be clear. This does not mean the likes of the New York Times have suddenly done a 180 and decided to become objective or neutral. That point was driven home again with “bloodbath-gate,” their deliberate conflation of Trump’s use of that word to mean he is endorsing political violence when he was quite obviously referring to the auto industry. But what it does mean is that elite media has evidently decided that whatever journalistic credibility they still enjoy would be completely eviscerated if they pretended Biden was popular or effective, or that Donald Trump was not rising in approval and running consistently ahead in the polls. This may be the first step in a long road back to integrity for once-respected media that sold its soul to take down Trump.
Consider the shockingly blunt assessment of the 46th president by NBC News, a charter member of elite media, in its article entitled “Behind the scenes, Biden has grown angry and anxious about re-election effort.” Given his increasingly “get off my lawn” disposition and sinking poll numbers, Biden’s fury is not exactly surprising, but with inside information gathered from 20 presumably reliable sources, it paints the picture of an angry old man – “President Joe Biden was seething … He began to shout and swear” – and a campaign utterly unable to break through with its message of economic and job growth or spin his transparent decline. And most notably, it describes advisors surrounding the president as apparently still locked into the belief that Donald Trump is “eminently beatable” in November – no matter what the polls are saying. But that is contrary to the views of high-ranking Democrats, according to NBC, as “[f]rustrations rippling through the party have reached the top.”
For the record, with seven and a half months until Election Day, Biden is sitting at 40% approval, comparable to two presidents who were badly beaten in their bids for re-election, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, and even a few points below Trump in 2020. Biden is trailing in the popular vote by an average of almost two points and has won just 11 of the 55 polls cited by Real Clear Politics (RCP) since the start of 2024. He trails Trump by 5 points in Arizona, according to the RCP average, 6 points in Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada, 4 points in Michigan, and he is also behind narrowly in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The bottom line: Biden is losing in every single swing state. And the numbers are even worse for Biden when independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein and Cornel West are added to the mix.
The False Confidence of Joe Biden.
By continuing to believe that Donald Trump’s liabilities will eventually overtake him, is the president’s campaign whistling past the graveyard? Is their confidence so high that they will make the exact same mistake as Hillary Clinton in 2016 by writing off Trump’s electability? Do they have that much faith in pandemic-era voting laws that have tilted the playing field heavily in their direction?
Do they know something we don’t know? Or is this an admission that Joe Biden is incapable of running the type of campaign thought necessary to overcome his glaring deficits on almost every issue? As Fox News contributor Joe Concha noted, Biden’s schedule on Monday included a White House tribute to Women’s History Month and his daily intelligence briefing – at 3 pm, no less. That’s it – no campaign activities. The Biden team is behaving as if this president is winning instead of losing.
“Biden stood up in front of the whole world and said, ‘I’m ready. I’m the guy who can take down Donald Trump,’” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) told NBC. “So, he goddamn well better do it. We don’t have time for him to be worried about whether or not people are saying things right or the poll numbers are where they should be. I want focused energy and not defensive anger.”
Biden has tried and failed to sell his record on several levels. He has been consistently thwarted by his own shameful neglect of the border, spiraling inner-city crime, and, most of all, persistently high prices of which people are reminded in their every financial transaction. With elite media now forced to admit Biden is in trouble and unable to run the type of energetic campaign necessary to demonstrate that he’s still up to the job, can campaign surrogates talk Americans into the belief that Trump will be a dictator prepared to orchestrate if he loses, and out of the belief that Biden is incapable of running the country for another four years? That has become the proverbial $64,000 question – adjusted for inflation, of course.
