Forget About Biden's 'Cruel Summer'--He's Doing Big Things

Forget About Biden’s ‘Cruel Summer’—He’s Doing Big Things
ALTERNATE REALITY
He’s ended America’s longest war, got vaccines distributed at no cost nationwide and halved the child poverty rate. So why all the stories about ‘Biden‘s Cruel Summer’?
David Rothkopf
Bernard Schwartz
Updated Sep. 13, 2021 10:29AM ET / Published Sep. 13, 2021 10:18AM ET


We are both old enough to remember a time when you picked up the newspaper in the morning or turned on the television news to find out what was happening in the world. Now, it is not that simple.

Opinion, spin, misguided attempts at “objectivity” that produce false equivalencies, the partisanship of some media outlets and a herd mentality in the press have made it difficult to know where the facts end and the truth begins. When untrue or misleading narratives emerge, they can take on a life of their own and have serious real world consequences—shifting the political landscape, remaking polls, changing how subsequent developments are viewed or even impacting whether and how they take place.

This has seldom been made more clear than in the recent treatment of President Biden in the media. Not only has much of it been divorced from reality, misguided, or twisted, but the real world implications of the narratives that have emerged in the past several weeks could have lasting negative ramifications for the country.

The facts of Biden’s presidency are there for all of us to see. When he took office, Biden inherited a country in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis, reeling from an unprecedented attack on its political system and wracked by social divisions the last president systematically sought to make worse. Our international standing had been battered by racist policies, nationalist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, attacks on our allies, corruption, efforts to undermine international institutions, embrace of our enemies and rejection of our own core democratic values.

In just eight months, the president and his team have engineered transformational progress on many fronts. Where there had been no plan to administer vaccines, today over 200 million Americans have received at least one shot and the vaccines are available to every American free of charge and are now required of federal workers as part of a sweeping effort to contain the spread of the virus here. Our vaccine diplomacy efforts lead the world, with commitments to share 600 million doses to countries in need worldwide. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan has cut the child poverty rate in half. More jobs, 4.1 million, were created in the first six months of this administration than in the 12 years of the Trump and Bush administrations combined. The U.S. economy grew at an extraordinary annualized rate of 6.5 percent during the second quarter of this year. Biden implemented scores of executive orders undoing Trump administration policies that damaged the environment, put our security at risk or violated the rights of Americans.

more/sorry, pay wall...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bidens-achievements-are-big-his-press-coverage-is-small?ref=home