AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
Amid the fallout from yet another foreign policy disaster under Joe Biden’s watch, the administration should be under serious pressure to answer for its glaring failures. But team Biden has by now learned that they can get away with anything because they will not face any of the media pressure normal administrations (and particularly Republican administrations) face not to make major mistakes, or to rapidly correct problems when they arise.
Mounting evidence suggests that the Biden administration’s actions emboldened and empowered Hamas ahead of their brutal assault on Israel. Hamas leaders have boasted that the attacks were funded by Iran – just weeks after Biden released $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Soon after taking office, Biden also resumed sending hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to the Palestinian Authority, which has a long history of using aid money to fund “pay for slay” attacks on Israelis and Americans.
These facts are indisputable, and an honest media would be hammering Biden over his culpability in the horrific crimes being perpetrated on the Israeli people.
Yet the president can rest easy knowing that there is virtually no chance of the media holding him to account for his failures. Instead of asking why the White House chose to release $6 billion to a country that chants “death to America” and fund an authoritarian regime whose sole mission is the destruction of the United States’ strongest Middle East ally, CBS, The New York Times, the AP, NBC News, and other prominent outlets all released glowing coverage of Biden’s remarks condemning the attacks, followed by headlines dismissing any criticism of Biden’s foreign policy as a baseless GOP talking point.
This is a pattern that has played out throughout Biden’s presidency, with the media acting as Biden’s personal PR firm rather than the voice of the American people.
From the onset of Biden’s presidential run, it was obvious that a 77-year-old has-been career politician in an obvious state of cognitive decline stood no chance of winning the White House without an intense, coordinated effort to boost his candidacy.
So, the media elites launched a campaign of their own to portray Biden’s shortcomings as strengths and incompetence as wisdom. COVID-19 allowed them to bill Biden’s refusal (or inability) to leave his basement as legitimate concern about the virus. The embarrassing lack of enthusiasm for Biden’s candidacy was likewise chalked up to the pandemic.
Biden’s repeated gaffes on the campaign trail – a trend that has continued into his presidency – were dismissed as the result of a “childhood stutter,” despite the fact that he seemingly had no trouble speaking during his decades in the Senate. Videos showing Biden forgetting where he was and even what office he was running for were simply “missing context,” the media insisted.
Lest there be any doubt about the extent to which the media was willing to go to mask Biden’s glaring deficiencies, they then played a central role in the scheme to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election.
With Biden in office, the media’s job has expanded from just hiding Biden’s incompetence to also excusing the tangible policy failures of his administration.
As inflation rose throughout 2021 and 2022, the media blamed everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Russia-Ukraine war – everything except the $6.5 trillion Biden added to the deficit. When the country entered a recession last year, the media instantly adopted the administration’s new definition of a recession, sparking a battle over the technical definition of the term that was intentionally designed to distract from the dire economic realities facing the American people.
Lacking a viable excuse for the millions of people illegally pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border, the media has engaged in a coordinated blackout on that crisis, simply refusing to cover what can only be described as an all-out invasion. Even as border communities desperately plead for more federal resources and a change in policy, the legacy press has refused to consistently pressure the administration on the issue, allowing Biden to avoid scrutiny.
Biden has similarly been given a pass by the media for his botched handling of multiple disasters, including the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, another fatal train derailment in Montana, and the Maui wildfires.
After some initial outrage, the media quickly moved on from Biden’s shameful Afghanistan debacle, and have steadfastly refused to call for any accountability for that failure. Other foreign policy fiascos like a bungled submarine deal that led to France recalling its ambassador from Washington were also shamefully underreported. But could we really expect the media to give these embarrassing flubs any sort of appropriate coverage after they promised throughout 2020 that Biden’s record would make him a great diplomatic success story?
It is certainly true that the American people should blame Biden and his lieutenants for their gross incompetence and ineptitude. Biden is ultimately the one who makes the final decision on administration policy; moreover, he is the only one whom voters can directly replace.
But Americans also shouldn’t forget who has been enabling and cheerleading Biden’s failures every step of the way. The media set out to force Biden on the country, and they succeeded. Then, they tried to gaslight the entire nation into believing that things weren’t actually getting more expensive, and the world wasn’t actually getting more dangerous, while at the same time convincing the administration to continue down the destructive path it was on.
They’ve made themselves complicit in Biden’s disaster presidency as a result.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.
