Trying to save its own reputation, the NY Times pretends Biden’s decline wasn’t obvious
Does the Times really think people will believe it’s that stupid and unobservant? In other words, does the Times think people are that stupid and unobservant?:
After actively engaging in a coverup of Biden’s cognitive state — the brave, intrepid journalists at NYT are out with a tell-all piece on the coverup — blaming Biden’s inner circle, and taking zero responsibility themselves.
Everything they lied about for years, they now admit is true — Biden’s “walkers” to hide his shuffle, the short stairs to AF1, his frequent falls, cognitive lapses, telepromper woes, needing naps for debate prep — everything.
Legacy media is attempting to rewrite history and play the hapless victim of a White House inner circle that managed to dupe them for four years, in a vain attempt to salvage their tattered reputations and cratered credibility.
Here’s a link to the Times article, with its “now it can be told” facts:
[Biden’s staff] rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.
Funny how everyone on the right saw it, and has seen it, for years.
More:
They had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand. They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls.
This was no secret.
The article keeps up the pretense that Biden’s problem were mostly physical, in terms of walking, balance, and stamina. It continues to downplay his obvious cognitive problems that were present even in 2020 during that campaign. And the debate with Trump last June? Here’s how the Times treats it:
Mr. Biden needed naps during the debate preparations and then turned in a halting, incoherent performance universally described as “disastrous” by panicking Democrats. Even close aides aware of the president’s frailties were stunned by what they saw. It was, as Senator Chuck Schumer of New York recounted in a recent interview, “a big shock.”
Three weeks later Mr. Biden dropped out of the race.
Note how the Times skips the story of how he was “persuaded” to drop out.
Iowahawk was never more prescient ‘cover a story with a pillow until it stops moving’
The Washington Post has lost huge numbers of subscribers and it losing huge sums of money. What’s the financial situation at the NY Times? Except among the hard left it has no reputation left to lose.
Some of the NYT’s readers think lying like this is just dandy. So finding the NYT has been lying won’t affect their view.
What proportion of the remaining readers will, the NYT thinks, believe them?
How many readers will find this the final straw, whether it’s the fiftieth or the third?
Do professional journalists have a list of multipliers to apply to such categories?
What Michelle Malkin had to say on departing public discussion three years ago: there is no more reporting, merely ‘information ops’.
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The Times is an example of an institution which was. 40 years ago open to critique but arguably salutary on balance. Now it would improve public life by disappearing. You have those who have occupied the publisher’s chair since 1992 to thank for that, and their deputies.
Kate-
NY Times is publicy traded, common stock NYT. Trades only 1 million shares per day, a trivial amount by Wall Street standards, and is near its 52 week high!
WaPo is 100% owned by Jeff Bezos. I don’t get how he lets it run itself. Why own a newspaper if owner will not set editorial policies?
I guess Bezos the billionaire is a very big man in DC. Bought the former buildings of the Textile Museum (of which I was once a member) and turned them into a huge personal domicile.
“You have those who have occupied the publisher’s chair since 1992 to thank for that”
I went to high school with Pinch Sulzberger. But it was only for a year because he flunked out. He was a moron and a loser. The “paper of record” keeps handing down the publisher’s job in the family as if it were heirloom china, what a joke. Sadly the victims of the joke have been the American people but at last hopefully it seems they are catching on.
I would think tell all books will come out by end of the year.
Before Sundowner started his term most knew he was mentally inefficient
I think it less a matter of stupidity and cluelessness and more a case of willful blindness and obstinacy.
“Pike Bishop: A hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just can’t stand to be wrong.
Dutch Engstrom: Pride.
Pike Bishop: And they can’t forget it… that pride… being wrong. Or learn by it.” dialog from the movie The Wild Bunch
That said, the NYT, entire mass media and democrat party have just begun to encounter the reality of the truth of which Abe Lincoln spoke; “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.
It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” -Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854.”
The NYT is making money, even though its print subscribers have cratered. Digital games have been big earners for the NYT.Games are helping the New York Times thrive amid media chaos.
G.B.: totalitarian obstinacy uber Alles characterize today’s Democrats.
They aren’t reporters or investigators. They’re just repeating the narrative and broadcasting the stories that their sources in government give them, so it’s understandable that they feel deceived and used when the narrative that’s been given them turns out not to be true — or not to be useful anymore. They didn’t think it was their job to question it or prove it or disprove it, so they feel betrayed now.
Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary was attacked for calling an not true statement “inoperative,” but it does describe the situation here. It didn’t matter if Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and conducting “Socratic dialogues” with his underlings or not. That version of things was “operative” and useful — until it wasn’t. It was contradicted by Biden’s debate performance, but much, much more than that it was contradicted by the new, more “operative” narrative.
None of this is intended to be an accounting, an attempt to come clean, or first steps toward restoring trust in the brand. They can’t imagine that people could think they have anything for which they should apologize. Did anyone see the rapturous reception Slow Joe got at the State Department? Or Merrick Garland’s farewell ovation at Justice? These articles are part of the process of grieving. “Joe Biden was one of the best and most successful presidents ever. How did we get here? How could this disaster have happened?” I know, I know: it is a puzzlement.
Thanks, Gringo. So, the NYT is a gaming platform much more than a news source theses days. All those who play Wordle are helping it stay afloat.
Kate:
I play Wordle for free. I guess I give them one click a day, which is payment of a sort, but no money.
If I can toot my own horn, you can find some Wordle variants on my site, link below. Much of the rest on the site is only partially complete, but the first two Wordle links you see work pretty well. Click the little question mark in the upper left for a description of the differences.
https://steveswebdepot.tech/
Good for you, Neo! The article Gringo linked to spoke of a $6/month games-only subscription. I’m glad you’re not paying them.
Cicero: “I guess Bezos the billionaire is a very big man in DC. Bought the former buildings of the Textile Museum (of which I was once a member) and turned them into a huge personal domicile.”
You mean the old Textile Museum off 23rd Street NW? That was a lovely place. Well, damn it. Guess Bezos needed a D.C. mansion close to Obama. Same as Zuckerberg, who will change his tack and suck up to whoever seems to be in power.
Compare these moral midgets to George Hewitt Myers (Yale 1898), an heir to the Bristol-Myers fortune who founded the Textile Museum in 1925. Or Robert Woods Bliss (Harvard 1900), a career diplomat who donated Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard and wrote a monograph on pre-Columbian art. Where are the old-school plutocrats?
Kate:
I was grandfathered (grandmothered?) in from the original Wordle site. When the Times bought the game, they didn’t charge those who had already been playing. At some point I expect them to change that, and I probably will drop it rather than give them money.
Hubert,
Yes, the old and gracious Textile Museum. I had the distinct honor of serving on its Board way back when, because I was then an active collector of Trans-Caucasian salt bags, of which my old college classmate, the heavily published John Wertime, now long deceased, was the pre-eminent dealer, a major Textile Museum guru and sponsor. His many articles were published in Hali, a terrific magazine for cognoscenti.
The salt bags, acquired at modest cost, have not increased in price, and make fine wall hangings. There are few of them. Little interest, it seems.
Or Merrick Garland’s farewell ovation at Justice?
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What’s disconcerting is that they were all standing. Find out who attended and can their asses.
Speaker Mike Johnson knew about Biden’s debility, and did not share with the public what he knew when he knew it.
This is one that even Dr Watson had figured out.
Short version:
“Biden” is THE ONLY THING that prevents the NAZI takeover of America.
(Why is this so difficult to understand?)
Speaker Mike Johnson knew about Biden’s debility, and did not share with the public what he knew when he knew it.
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Everyone knew this. The population of partisan Democrats lied to themselves and others about this.
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My wager is that Johnson simply did not see a pathway to addressing the matter in any practical way. There is a procedure under the 25th Amendment, but the procedure is sh!te and only workable if the president is willing and able to take the initiative. The drafters may have assumed a conscientious set of officials of a sort common in the 1912 birth cohort and no longer seen today.
“The Washington Post has lost huge numbers of subscribers and it losing huge sums of money. What’s the financial situation at the NY Times? Except among the hard left it has no reputation left to lose.” — Kate
Yes. This^. The NYT was once _the_ central office for all news coverage. All the Big Three network newcasts used it as their lodestone, ‘newspaper of record’ was only barely a boast, it was only a slight exaggeration of reality for a time.
Truthfully, they never deserved that level of reverence, but probably no institution does. They had some major scandals in their history (like Walter Durante’s deliberate shilling for the USSR), and they always leaned left. But for a long time they only leaned about as far left as the educated upper class in general did.
Furthermore, an advertising-based business model forced a certain amount of restraint.
Today the NYT is the core journalistic institution _of the progressive Left_ . Their audience is subscriber based rather than advertising based. The mass of their subscriber base are themselves firmly Lefty, and the NYT might in actual fact be a centrist voice _within that group_ . That is, they might be fairly balanced between the hard Left and the soft center Left. But their audience has little interest in anything that criticizes or undercuts the overall Lefty narrative.
Even back in 2017-2021, they protested whenever the NYT did a story even remotely exculpatory about the Trump Admin. They didn’t want facts, they wanted ‘the walls are closing in on Orange Man’. _That’s what they were paying for_ .
Right now, the NYT is not trying to salvage their national reputation. That’s not even relevant anymore. They’re trying to establish their reputation within their subscriber base, which is far from reflective of the general public.
“The NYT is making money, even though its print subscribers have cratered. Digital games have been big earners for the NYT.Games are helping the New York Times thrive amid media chaos.” — Gringo
That’s not a new phenomenon in essence. People have always read newspapers for other reasons than just the news. For years, it was a taken for granted reality in the business that you’d lose more readers by cutting the daily astrology column than you would be slashing political coverage, for ex. A lot of people read the paper primarily for the obits. Some people bought the paper for the comics.
And of course the classified ads were a ‘river of gold’ for the business. One reason local papers elsewhere are folding is that the classified ads no longer generate critical revenue.
”
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Speaker Mike Johnson knew about Biden’s debility, and did not share with the public what he knew when he knew it.
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My wager is that Johnson simply did not see a pathway to addressing the matter in any practical way. There is a procedure under the 25th Amendment, but the procedure is sh!te and only workable if the president is willing and able to take the initiative. The drafters may have assumed a conscientious set of officials of a sort common in the 1912 birth cohort and no longer seen today.” — Art Deco
You might well be right about Johnson not seeing any tool to use. That was part of the problem people who sympathized with Trump’s claims about the 2020 election had back in 2020: there just wasn’t really any practical tool to address it if it was true. (I’m not sure if Trump was right or not, I have no doubt extensive election chicanery, legal and illegal, almost all of it Democratic, happened in 2020. Whether it was what put Biden over the top, nobody will ever know for sure.)
As for the 25th Amendment, it wasn’t that its framers didn’t see the issue, it’s that it really has no practical solution. If you make it easy to use the 25th, it’ll inevitably become a tool of partisan power struggles, and they knew that. It _should_ be hard to remove a sitting President who was duly elected, after all. If you make it easy through the 25th, you’ll just replace the impeachment process with the 25th process. It wasn’t that they didn’t foresee bad people, it’s that they _did_ , and the 25th was the best compromise they could come up with.
If Congress could _easily_ remove a sitting President, over time I suspect that the result would be to gradually convert the USA into a _de facto_ parliamentary republic, with the Speaker of the House (as the leader of the majority in the House of Representatives) as the real executive power.
@ Oblio > “Did anyone see the rapturous reception Slow Joe got at the State Department? Or Merrick Garland’s farewell ovation at Justice?”
@ Art Deco > “What’s disconcerting is that they were all standing.”
I didn’t see those, but Not the Bee caught Austin’s going-away-party.
https://notthebee.com/article/watch-all-the-swamp-people-clap-as-lloyd-austin-leaves-the-pentagon-for-the-last-time
Perhaps NTB is onto something different:
“Maybe those people were clapping because he’s never coming back?”
I’d like to believe that was true at DOD, but I’m sure it’s not for the two others, which are vying for the title of Swamp Central.
Joe Biden exhibited serious & obvious cognitive decline during the 2019 Democrat party presidential debates–it was apparent to anyone paying attention. There were multiple videos showing Biden out campaigning & being physically pulled away from the press by his female handlers. The mainstream media was singularly incurious about all of this & covered it up. You can’t despise them enough.