Eric Boehlert: Biden's getting doomsday press -- just like Obama did

[babylonsister]

Biden's getting doomsday press — just like Obama did
Here we go again

Eric Boehlert
2 hr ago


It wouldn’t be surprising if President Joe Biden felt a strong sense of déjà vu as he marked his first year in office and the D.C. press eagerly writes him off as a failure buried by a mountain of crises, while at the same time erasing his accomplishments. (Record job gains, ending the Forever War.) Reading from GOP talking points, journalists remain in hyperventilation mode, obsessively detailing Biden’s soft polling numbers while loudly — and falsely —claiming he can’t get his key legislative initiatives passed into law.

Biden’s lurking sense of been-here-before would be driven by the fact that as Barack Obama’s vice president, he watched the same media story play out under a different Democratic administration. Hounded by a D.C. press corps that was often obsessed with tagging Obama as a failure, depicting him as overwhelmed and outsmarted by Republicans, and occasionally just losing its mind over relatively minor unfolding stories (remember Ebola and the glitchy Obamacare website?), the press misjudged one of the most successful and popular presidents of the last half century.

Today, the Beltway media remains in groupthink mode (CNN headline: “Is Biden's Presidency Doomed?”), with everyone eagerly hitting the same points regardless of the facts. "For now, virtually none of the groups that fueled Biden’s 2020 victory are happy,” the Associated Press recently reported, despite the fact that polling shows 80-plus percent of Democratic voters approve of Biden’s performance in office.

The Washington Post published a long obituary on Biden’s presidency this week, casting his first year in office as a failure. (“Disarray,” “tensions,” “worry,” “stumbled.”) Left unmentioned in the article’s 43 paragraphs was the fact that a record 6.4 million new jobs have been created since Biden took office, and that the U.S. now enjoys full employment with workers earning all-time high wages.

more...

https://pressrun.media/p/bidens-getting-doomsday-press-just

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Every one of these scumbags chose to leave quite a few facts out of their articles, it's

called 'bashing Biden' w/o all of the facts time, eh? They can't find anything of substance to bash so they literally have to make stuff up.

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

9. They have to toe the line or...

corporate "massa" will take away their goodies.

These people have no real moral center if they are willing to sacrifice our democracy to make money.

[spanone]

2. K&R

[abqtommy]

3. I'm also seeing doom 'n gloom articles regarding President Joe on the international

news sites I visit, like Al Jazeera, The BBC and The Guardian. It sure looks like a
conspiracy to me.

[unblock]

4. they never talked about donnie that way, despite him being the most consistently loathed potus ever.

donnie was never above 50% approval his entire presidency, and his "strongly disapprove" numbers were huge.

this was the consistent his entire time in office.

but when the media talked about his approval numbers, it was only to zoom in on the relatively small increase or decrease, usually without reminding people of the context that he was always underwater and that no president ever had strongly disapprove numbers like that other than during their worst scandals.

generally the media seemed to believe that donnie's approval numbers had no real bearing on the viability of his presidency or had any effect on policy or his ability to get anything accomplished. it only seemed to have some small hint as to whether or not he would be re-elected, though there was never any implication if re-election were to become unlikely that he would be any kind of lame duck.

but biden of course, after actual accomplishments and a massively booming economy, is portrayed as doomed, even though his numbers are higher than donnie's at the same point in his presidency.

[jimfields33]

5. He lost re-election

The last thing we need is Biden not being re-elected.

[unblock]

7. Clearly that's part of the media's goal.

The difference in coverage is astounding.

They had so many opportunities to end Donnie's reign of error had they been willing to just report the truth objectively or even to just hold him to the standards they hold democrats to. Instead, they constantly amplified his propaganda.

But they're working overtime to destroy Biden.

[doc03]

6. But even with the bad press Obama was re-elected. nt

[Mad_Machine76]

12. +1

They were ready to declare him a one-term POTUS after the 2010 midterms, with even some idiot "Fox News Democrats" openly opining that he should not stand for re-election and let Hillary run instead. Instead, he went on to win re-election by a comfortable margin. Sort of the idiotic advice and speculation about him replacing Kamala as VP for somebody else.......for some reason?

[gab13by13]

8. It has been deplorable,

for the past 3 months, attack after attack on president Biden. Every little slip he makes is amplified out of proportion.

He has done a fantastic job IMO, but nobody taking a poll asked me.

[maxsolomon]

10. There is a naivete in the American electorate

they think Biden can push buttons and turn everything around.

The youth see the inability to get around the Filibuster as a failure. They don't understand that it's been this way for decades.

They think he can push a button and forgive their student loans. He can't.

The swing voters see real inflation for the 1st time many of them can remember, and they think Biden has something to do with that. He doesn't. They don't understand that it is global.

None of it means he won't win re-election, because all the GQP has to offer is another #angrywhiteman. It just means Americans are reactive flibberdigibbets.

[Mad_Machine76]

13. +1 This all of this

Stuff like the student loans and the filibuster really enrage the Young Turks crowd on Twitter and it gets tiring trying to correct misinformation, although I don't think that Elizabeth Warren was helpful by publicly making a similar suggestion the other day(?).

[maxsolomon]

17. I'm living with a "Young Turks crowd" adult daughter during Covid.

She doesn't have my decades of accumulated cynicism. Yet.

[ificandream]

11. You have to understand how the press works (and not always in a good way)

First of all, you have to differentiate between opinion/analysis pieces and factual reporting. And unfortunately, these stories are, for the most part, opinion/analysis. I've always had a real distaste for giving these things equal visibility to real news stories. Unfortunately, the line between opinion/analysis and real news stories has been blurred incredibly in recent years. Back in the day, opinion/op-ed pieces were confined to a couple of pages in the second section of the paper. Not true anymore. Opinion is on the front page these days. Oh, Fox (and its right-wing media buddies) is a great part of that, but not the only part, unfortunately.

On the other hand, these pieces are part of the free press, which Trump tried desperately and unsuccessfully to bury. Opinion will not go away. But when you have total jackasses like Hannity, his Parrot (Pirro) and Fucker Carlson whose whole shtick is opinion and who keep repeating lies over and over, you find people don't know what not to believe.

A lot of these opinion pieces are for clickbait since that's a lot of what drives things these days. There's a school of thought that purely factual is boring and uninteresting. But it's the purely factual that stands out in the cloud of knowledge. Hopefully enough people will know what's factual and what's opinion. Opinion isn't necessarily bad. It can be good, actually. But it's no substitute for reality. (And not reality shows ... that's another issue (and a pet peeve of mine).

[harumph]

14. People don't know facts from opinion. Obviously.

The so called fourth estate has been thoroughly debauched.

The kind of folks elevated in the MSM to be
"journalists" aren't our brightest stars. Affable communications
majors without a moral rudder. No Edward R Murrow types - or at least those
people aren't afforded the limelight. I think the reason for this is rich people own
media companies and at the end of the day, their personal interests - meaning the
personal interests of the folks on the board of directors are the interests being pushed.
They can't come out and honestly say 'I'm no different than say, a slum lord or coal
mine owner inasmuch as our common strategies to keep capital gains taxes low
and to get rid of the inheritance tax...' but instead, they promote their private
financial agenda with populist opinion designed to reaffirm the prejudices
of viewers AND "reporting" that manages to both OMIT and CHERRY PICK
facts. In order to push the agenda, they recruit people with weak egos and
a need for attention - who are glad for the paycheck.

Mostly the rich don't give a flying fuck about justice or climate change because they
can purchase the best lawyers, delay sentencing, file for a change of venue, stall stall stall, move to
nice areas least affected by climate change, etc., They do not give a fuck about this - but they do
give a gigantic fuck about keeping their wealth intact and passing it on generationally.


TV/cable "journalism" is a basically a pantomime.., and have you noticed the decline of print
journalism? Most staff can't even write legibly.

[ificandream]

16. Oh, indeed I have noticed it...

People who have been in the business (and I confess I was for over 35 years) definitely notice the changes. I disagree there aren't any Murrow types. There are, but as you say, they don't have the spotlight. It's really the fault of the flash-by media that wants everything out there as fast as possible. Which gives rise to the clickbait thing. Which, as you said, brings in the bucks.

There are some good journalists still out there. Bob Woodward is one.

[uponit7771]

15. K&R, how in the world are dems not up +15 generic right now. These bastards tried to take over the

... government a year ago.

[maxsolomon]

18. 1, Dems are baby-killers

'Bortion accounts for a solid % of votes for the GQP that might otherwise be for Dems. I am related to a few of these voters.

2, Propaganda works. 40 years of hate radio, a quarter-century of Fox News.

3, People are ignorant, and have the memories of goldfish.