Taibbi: Biden’s Troubles Aren’t Bernie’s Fault… Or A Media Mirage

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News Substack,

A recent column by Colbert King in the Washington Post read as follows:

A president and Congress seen united and fighting for people will be a team that gets rewarded at the polls. Accomplishing that calls for less selfish and self-serving political behavior – from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) – and more care toward making life better for Americans.

Entitled, “Where Will Democratic Infighting Lead? History’s Answer is Clear,” King’s piece essentially blames Bernie Sanders for the recent Supreme Court thinking on abortion.

Intramural debate, which he calls “infighting,” lead in his mind to poor electoral results for mainstream Democrats, who for all their other faults are consistent on the abortion issue and therefore deserve the frictionless political existence Sanders denied them.

King’s piece is penned as a warning, that not only Republican opposition “inspired by Trump” but “left-wing complaints of ‘corporate Democrats’ beholden to corrupt businesses, Big Pharma and the ultra-wealthy” have left Joe Biden with “slumping poll numbers.” As a result, he says, “Joe Biden is on the path to a one-term presidency.”

On the same day, in the same paper, Dana Milbank wrote an editorial, apparently not intended as satire, entitled, “The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.”

After listing headlines like “Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?” and “No BIF bump for Biden” as anecdotal evidence of this savagery, Milbank turned to the hard “proof”: data from a company called “FiscalNote.”

The firm did a “sentiment analysis” of 200,000 articles and apparently found that “Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.”

I struggle to conceive of the brain that would believe such a thing to be true, but that’s a separate matter.

Milbank believed it, and concluded, “My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”

…

So they doubled and tripled down, soon congratulating themselves for substituting terms like “lie” for “untruth” and “white supremacist” for “racist” or “race-baiting,” and so on.

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