Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson is making headlines for what is a scathing critique of the press for allegedly being fooled by what she describe es as a “massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline.”
Her 266-word scold appears at Semafor, and seems too little, too late, and too convenient. It looks all too much like—what’s that term, again?—“fake news.”
Abramson was the Times executive editor from 2011 to 2014. In her remarks, she offers this observation, which seems just a bit implausible: “The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age.”
Then, a few lines later, she may have come closer to the truth: “I worry that too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump. I get that.”
And in the process, the country got Joe Biden, known throughout his career as something of a “storyteller,” tales in which he always seemed to be the smartest guy in the room, and which were frequently found to have been questionable in nature, if not fabrications.
Abramson talks a good game, observing, “But this is no excuse for abandoning our first duty, which is to report the truth and hold power accountable.”
Oh, c’mon, Jill. When there is a Democrat in the Oval Office, the establishment press corps, and the editorial boards of major newspapers, have abandoned their job as “watchdogs” and taken on the role of “lap dogs,” and the decline of newspaper subscribers tells that tale.
Newspapers have lost tens of millions of conservative subscribers who feel no great obligation to financially support news agencies whose focus tilts increasingly left, calling riots “mostly peaceful protests” as buildings burn, for example. Likewise, those folks have drifted away from network news broadcasts in favor of Fox News, which does not treat them like lepers, and reports news from a different perspective.
Among the lost subscribers and viewers are millions of gun owners for whom editorial pages read like broken records, invariably calling for and supporting increasingly restrictive gun control laws that only to penalize law-abiding citizens and do nothing to prevent crime or punish criminals. Those laws invariably have Democrat DNA all over them.
Biden came into office already in visible cognitive decline and the press knows it. Nobody was duped, misled, bamboozled or kept in the dark. At best, they went along for the ride.
The press knows something else about Biden, which should have kept reporters on their guard from the moment he announced his candidacy four years ago: Joe is a plagiarist, and it is discussed at length in an article at Wikipedia. Plagiarism is theft of someone else’s intellectual property. Plagiarism is repugnant and, at least among a declining number of “old school” journalists, unforgivable. (Note: This correspondent was once plagiarized.)
While admitting the press corps’ anathema about the prospect of “helping elect Donald Trump,” Abramson fails to acknowledge the media’s preoccupation with skewering Trump helped reporters overlook or deliberately ignore Biden’s failures. Has there ever been another president so demonized by the establishment media like Trump has been?
Second Amendment activists and advocates know this kind of demonization all too well. Just over a year ago, for example, the Washington Monthly published an article under the headline, “The Myth of the Responsible Gun Owner.” Pretty hard for gun owners to not take offense at stuff like that.
A large portion of American gun owners will be voting for Trump—the man reporters cringe at the thought of helping get elected—because whatever else the former president may or may not be, he has been far friendlier to the Second Amendment than Biden, whose claims to being a “Second Amendment guy” are dismissed as hogwash by the firearms community.
When Abramson writes, “It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance,” she seems oblivious to the fact conservatives think it is “astounding” she hasn’t seen what they have been seeing for the past couple of years, at least. They see the press as Biden’s enablers, not as people trying to hold him accountable.
They see the press as blind to Biden’s faults as he and his administration are to the porous southern border, our diminished national profile as a world leader and the harm his domestic policies have done to the middle class.
Abramson’s scolding of her media colleagues appears conveniently timed to give the press a chance to dust itself off and vow to get tough again on the man in the Oval Office, just in time to justify their reborn aggressiveness as it appears the next man in that office will be named Trump.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
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