This month, President Joe Biden’s White House sent out a frantic missive to various news organizations with instructions on how to cover the Biden impeachment hearings. For most people who recognize that legacy media has, for decades, been a stenography service for the Democrats, this is not a surprise. What is unusual is the direct and public nature of the orders sent from on high.
The memo, sent directly to outlets like the New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, and Fox News, and then later to the White House press corp list, insists they focus on the “lies” of the House impeachment hearings surrounding Biden’s alleged involvement in his son Hunter’s international business dealings. The memo titled, “Memo to Editorial Leadership at US Media Organizations” orders, It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies…’”
Sure sounds like a note you’d get from your boss about how to do your job.
We’ve known for decades that legacy media is a collection of stenographers working for the Democratic party. At least in the past, they made an effort to not have the connection be so obvious, and that’s what makes this development so revealing. It seems there is a general panic inside the White House about losing the fealty of the legacy media. Normally, you wouldn’t have to tell them directly what to do—the media would get their marching orders from the comments of the White House press secretary or what Pelosi or Schumer would say to the media. Even the media’s own far-left sympathies are enough to continue to steep stories in blatant bias for any Democrat or leftist issue. But are those days over? Not really. This is about Democrats losing the White House in 2024. They’re willing to throw Biden under the bus for any other genuine Marxist autocrat.
Most of the legacy media still try to pretend that they’re “independent” journalists, only seeking truth and justice. They’re not biased, they insist; they just have sole possession of the truth! So you would think there would be widespread shock and dismay that the people they’re “holding accountable” would insult them by issuing orders about their coverage when they don’t even need to. With very few exceptions, there was no outrage, just compliance.
There was some pseudo-concern from one reliably leftist newspaper which delivered on the memo’s orders and then, in the same piece, whined about the impression people would get from the memo. The Boston Globe, judged as a left-wing paper with a “media bias in ways that strongly align with liberal, progressive, or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas,” cried about being exposed as stenographers:
“Biden’s White House places the press in an impossible position: either news organizations will look like they are following the White House’s directive when they diligently, fairly, and with proper context report on the impeachment probe, or they will appear to be adversaries if they engage in coverage that the White House doesn’t like.” But if you’re independent, why would you worry about this? I don’t recall anyone from the legacy media being worried about being seen as adversaries to Trump; in fact, that seemed to be the gold standard. For the New York Times and Washington Post, you can even carry water for fake news and a completely false Russia dossier hoax, win the Pulitzer Prize, be exposed as fake news purveyors, and still get to keep the prize! It’s almost like everyone knew exactly what they were doing.
Signaling their disconnect from the actual world, the Globe then laments, “[The memo] also, intentionally or not, opens the door to further attacks on the media or, even worse, sets the press up as an easy scapegoat for any undesired outcome of the impeachment probe. Even if there is no chance that this investigation will lead to an actual impeachment — it won’t — any negative outcome, like poor polling numbers, will be blamed on press coverage as opposed to the White House’s own response.”
Who’s going to tell them their partisan bias cat has been out of the bag for decades? A Gallup poll last year made it completely clear that Americans know full well that the media has abandoned its mission and are partisan hacks for the leftist agenda. Gallup reported, “Just 7% of Americans have ‘a great deal’ of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have ‘a fair amount…’ Americans’ trust in the media remains sharply polarized along partisan lines, with 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence.”
Systemic bias is confirmed, not in that trust in media is at a record low (which it is), but that a super-majority of Democrats are perfectly happy with it! That is what should worry any serious journalist who laments the impact of the Biden memo.
For the left, controlling their partisan hacks in legacy media has been easy for decades. Not so much for social media. The Democrat Party’s plan to enact a censorship regime for social media has been dealt a serious blow by the Federal courts. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found Biden officials “likely violated the First Amendment” when they coerced social media platforms to remove content.
The appeals court injunction applied to the White House, the surgeon general, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI, saying they could not ‘coerce or significantly encourage’ the [social media] companies to remove content,” reported Reuters.
Apparently, for Biden and the Democrats, not attempting to violate Americans’ First Amendment is a bridge too far, and they have appealed to the Supreme Court. SCOTUS temporarily paused the injunction, giving the parties until September 20th to respond. The SCOTUS decision on this issue will tell us if the Constitution will remain relevant in the future of our nation.
The Democrats rely on controlling what information we receive in order to maintain their power over us. The good news is, even after decades of being hectored and gaslit by legacy media, we are not liberal zombies and remain independent patriots appropriately suspicious of a government strangely desperate for complete control over news and information.