After insisting a lying President is unacceptable the New York Times cannot bring itself to address Biden’s growing deceptions.
Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed President Jose Biden deliver a string of mystifying falsehoods regarding his policies and his past. The man has drifted into the realm of fabulism more and more, making wild boasts about issues they are or are not addressing in his administration, as well as crafting fables about his personal life. He’s claimed Jewish faith, Puerto Rican heritage, a civil rights background, a career as a long-haul trucker, that he nearly lost his home and family in a fire, grew up in an area where oil rained down on residents, and other desperate claims to assimilate with whichever crowd he is addressing.
The New York Times has chosen this week to basically offer up a writing guide for other reporters so that they can have a handy reference guide on how to address these examples of their chosen President delivering provably wrong facts. The Times writers Linda Qiu and Michael D. Sheer take on the challenge in the effort to completely reframe the lying tendencies of President Biden, and in so doing they have christened him Biden, Storyteller In Chief. This is a marvel of re-interpretational reporting, and this list they draw up is impressive.
And this follows what the press has been up to already in regard to Jose Biden.
It is quite a glaring departure in the press, but not a surprising one. They spent years collocating Donald Trump’s lies, saying that any deviation from hard facts was a LIE, and then adding their impressions to the tote board. Yes, Trump was prone to spitting out lies, grandiose claims, and self-created myths. It cannot be denied. But this is about the press and their sudden departure from concern over Presidential prevarications.
This tendency was tipped off before Biden even took office. Following one of the debates between Trump and Biden we saw Danial Dale, of CNN, give his fact-check assessment of the meetup. Trump as expected was charged with numerous lies. Biden? He was “mostly truthful”, and the blatant deceptions were calibrated by Dale as “Biden was imperfect” on some issues, and we saw “lacking in context claims from him.”
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File
We saw this tendency to simply avoid the frauds from the President early on after Biden’s inauguration. Washington Post’s famed fact checker Glenn Kessler stated they would not keep a tally of Joe Biden’s lies, as he assumed a Biden administration would be forthright in supplying supporting data to claims made by the President. Dale even went so far as to say that after Joe Biden signed dozens of executive orders during his first days in office in defiance of his campaign statement of this being the work of an authoritarian – in other words, he had lied – cruelly, his words were being used against him.
And there is the foundation. Holding Joe accountable for what he says is not on the table. But what are journalists to do, after years of telling us a President lying is horrible? The answer: Reclassify Jose Biden’s lying as something else. To the rescue, in rides Sheer and Qiu with their handy guide. In this lengthy explainer of Biden’s fables, they deliver a wide array of new terms for lying in a helpful manner for journos. Buckle in – this is a long ride through a forest of ambiguity and double meaning.
The habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity…exaggerated biography…has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience…Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore…the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful…Mr. Biden’s fictions…weave together his political identity…he could stretch the truth up to a point…a serial exaggerator…continued to shave the truth…curious stories…
Of course, the writers, and administration officials, have to dredge up the name Donald Trump as a shield. Sure, he may tell fables from time to time but it is nowhere on the scale of his predecessor, goes their defense. But this does little to excuse Biden. If it was wrong when Trump did it then it should be wrong today. When faced with that reality the only thing to do is turn toward unreality; if you do not call them lies then he is not a liar!
The issue is that this article from the Times only focuses on the personal tales Biden unravels. There is no addressing of policy issues, administration statements, data points, and other forms of fiction this White House delivers on the regular. In those instances, the press loves to reclassify his words as well. Where Trump citing a data point inaccurately or getting a date wrong was instantly deemed a LIE, Biden is afforded redefined coverage.
Telling people they will save $6,000 when it is actually a few hundred? “Biden misspoke“. Give false Covid data (a high crime, according to the press)? Biden “overstated the improvement”. How about giving false figures on the average price of gas? Whoops, he just made an inaccurate boast, making an inadvertent error. And this tendency of the forgiving press is actually seen in some data.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Our compatriots at NewsBusters looked into Politifact efforts and noted that the site went after critics of Joe Biden far more often than they fact-checked the President on his statements. At a rate of basically 6/1 those making comments about Biden were analyzed, as the media protection racket is made rather obvious. When everything spoken is regarded as inadvertent verbal miscues there is little reason to delve into the facts.
Just correct the record, smooth out the wrinkles, and by no means count the instances when Biden delivers falsehoods. This way the administration can maintain the image of an honest, ethical, and transparent administration.