June 28, 2024 - 7:25am
Joe Biden is in the middle of the worst news cycle of his 50-year political career and it’s not nearly bad enough. Perhaps Chuck Todd of NBC News put it best, stunned after the President’s match-up with Donald Trump on Thursday night. “Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting,” said Todd. “And there were no clips here, you saw it before your eyes.”
Todd and other journalists raced to report on the mid-debate panic among high-level Democrats who realised the President’s performance had left the country shocked at the state of his health. A panel of liberal pundits on MSNBC wondered whether Biden could be replaced on ballots ahead of the Democratic Party’s convention in August.
The New York Times ran a story before CNN’s surprisingly well-moderated event ended, with the headline “I’m Hearing High Anxiety From Democrats Over Biden’s Debate Performance.” Nicholas Kristof, a star Times columnist, followed up shortly after with an article saying he hopes Biden “reviews his debate performance Thursday evening and withdraws from the race, throwing the choice of a Democratic nominee to the convention in August”.
Some journalists credulously repeated spin the Biden campaign rolled out about an hour into the debate, “confirming” reports the President had a cold. In coverage of the whole affair, some outlets also strained to balance Biden’s obvious failure with jabs at Trump’s performance, suggesting there was some equivalence between the two’s shortcomings on the night.
More egregious, though, is the media’s sudden pivot on Biden’s health. Take Todd’s use of the word “caricature” in reference to the Right’s prior attacks on Biden. Even Special Counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Biden’s attorney general, described the President several months ago as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. When Biden convened a bizarre press conference in February to rebut Hur’s claim, he confused the President of Egypt with his Mexican counterpart. Leaks from inside the G7 summit earlier this month suggested others in proximity to the President share Hur’s assessment.
When, in early June, the Wall Street Journal published a long report on behind-the-scenes concerns that Biden’s health was “slipping”, Morning Joe mocked the story, joking the paper should have just asked Republican Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene for her opinion. Joe Scarborough called the story “false and biased”. CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter attempted to pick the Journal story apart, writing: “The Wall Street Journal owes its readers — and the public — better.”
What’s curious is that, as soon as the debate made it impossible to deny Biden’s deterioration, so many people in the media suddenly had sources in the Democratic Party claiming to be shocked — and so many of those journalists claimed to be shocked themselves. Of course, it’s never comforting to see your commander-in-chief lost on stage, fumbling for words with glazed eyes and an empty expression, but it’s also impossible to believe that Biden’s health is news to Beltway insiders.
Which stories weren’t written that should have been? Amid the drip-drip of brave reporting, many of the same people who are now aghast at Biden’s condition told us they had first-hand knowledge that everything was fine, or that every report questioning his health amounted to, dare I say, a “caricature”.
Either they were overstating the quality of their access or they were engaging in dishonest spin. The result is a poorly-informed public with less trust in the media and no choice to vote for another candidate because the Democratic Primary is over.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribePoppy, you are my waifu.
The welfare state, that the West has become, feeds this self indulgence.
‘welfarism is destroying our economies and our values’
Maybe if work paid enough so that full time workers didn’t need government assistance to pay the extortionate rent then it wouldn’t be an issue
The welfare state in the West has encouraged self indulgence, and in so many ways we are accordingly unaccountable for our behaviour.
‘welfarism is destroying our economies and our values’
Welfarism and withdrawal are inevitable consequences of thug-conservatism.
Conservatives deploring self-indulgence are often the most self-indulgent of all.
It is in any case, Capitalist affluence that has destroyed our values and personal dignity – just as it did in the Gilded Age, the Belle Epoque, of 1870-1914.
And before that, in Ancient Rome.
Almost a throwaway remark in the piece, but isn’t this odd.
Second wave feminists for whom physical embodiment, male or female, was scarcely meant to matter – best described as biological minimalists; and American conservatives, playing down the importance of sexual physicality and often anti Darwin; suddenly cuddling up to each other under a banner of biological realism!
I’m increasingly enjoying Poppy’s postcards from youth culture.
Harder to know what to make of it though. Our culture has leaned youthful, if not infantile, since the 60s – but increasingly people seem unable to make the transition from child to adult at all.
It would be easy to pretend things have only turned odd recently, but these young (and not so young) people are our creation – they didn’t just appear out of nothing. What did we do, or not do, that they should find simply growing up into adult men and women so difficult?
The housing crisis certainly isn’t helping in that regard. Whereas you used to be able to get a basic job which would allow you to move out of home and onto the property ladder fairly quickly, now even decent jobs will only get you into a grotty house share with 4 other people so many end up living at home until much later in life
Wow! That was so boring I mean who really cares? Weebs are the least of our cultural problems. It’s the isolated young men in their bedrooms who are obsessed with death and violence we need to be concerned about according to two tier….
I’m with you on that – also, too many words required to get each little Japanese concept/conceit dropped in front of us, like a spaniel pup dropping a dead mouse at your feet. Or should that be dayid-ddoh mousii-ka?
Excellent and very interesting. Is the Japanese phenomenon of hikomori a retreat from competition and effort and a retreat to comfort?
Great; a different strain of mental illness to join the other varieties.
Please go outside and do some reporting from the real world.
Typically one-sided. The anime fandom contains multitudes and certainly isn’t monopolised by trans-adjacent progressives. The right wing centred on 4chan has always been a force in the fandom. Black anime fans are another major strand with their own community and culture. In the end, it’s not that serious. Another form of television and pornography, but the western world lacks for neither.
A really interesting article by the cultural ambassador for the 21st century.
The allure of Japanese culture for those of us in the West comes in part from the fact that Japan is essentially the only non-Western country to modernize on its own terms, rather than having modernity thrust upon it by either colonial occupation (cf. Africa, India, the Americas, Australia,..) or a Communist take-over (cf. Russia, China). The Japanese reaction against the imposition of unequal treaties, in the Meiji Restoration (or Meiji Revolution), manged to integrate Western ways, picked and chosen based on what the Japanese thought best — British-style education, Prussian-style military organization,… — into traditional Japanese culture. They consciously thought of themselves as somehow Western in comparison to the rest of Asia — the propaganda manga from the Russo-Japanese War make the Russians look more Asiatic than the Japanese. And down to the present day, many manga and anime seem to be set in a fictional Japan inhabited by a population with European-like variations in hair and eye color extended to unnatural shades for both (hence the pastel pink and blue hair on cosplayers) and eyes as round or rounder than Europeans. So, in a way Japan being an exception to Orientalism is something the Japanese chose for themselves.
It’s all about technology. Technology allows our fantasies to come true (houses instead of caves, fast cars instead of shanks pony, cosmetic surgery etc. etc. etc. …).
Where does it end? Only at the limits of our desires, & the limitations of physics. Whatever they are.
Does this explain in some indirect way why so many GenZers and whatever they’re calling the next one won’t drive or leave home?
Very interesting article weaving together some interesting threads. I am a little surprised it doesn’t reference SciFi, in particular the (dated) fan culture around techno-futuristic / post-scarcity imaginaries like Star Trek. Like anime fan culture it offers storylines with thinly veiled “alien ethicities” that reek with the odor of exoticism if more firmly tethered to their very real, actual existing cultural referents.
Also a reply for the commenter who counters that Anime fan culture is not a monolith, that there are diverse subgroups not related to “trans-progressives” : Well, yeah, addressing any social movement or culture group is reductive because there is always diversity within the brackets, down to the individual … but this is what some now find so troublesome with identity politics: the continuous fracturing and splintering into smaller identity groups, without regard for what binds people together and might make communal action possible. It’s become a tired response, and while universalism has seemed so impossibly out of fashion, it is what’s needed to see beyond the hopeless push towards individuation and self-made identities, in order to find common purpose.