Won’t Get Fooled Again (Or Will We?)

In September of 2016, candidate Hillary Clinton appeared to suffer some kind of health event while campaigning. The media tore into it like a pack of hyenas and pumped out story after story about dire prognoses and whether she could/should stay in the race. Turns out she had a touch of pneumonia from which she quickly recovered. However, an ongoing feeding frenzy led to wild headlines one would normally only see in the tabloids (and many did appear there, next to the latest updates about Bat Boy).

In the wake of Joe Biden’s admittedly lackluster performance at the first debate, we’re being flooded by similar overheated stories questioning his fitness for a second term. Biden admitted that he was exhausted from a lot of international travel plus a slight cold. His doctors have released his medical reports (including neurological exams) showing that he’s in excellent shape. Has that stopped the media? Of course not. We’ve gotten phony stories that he has Parkinson’s (he doesn’t) and that he “wandered off” at a D-Day event (he didn’t; the footage was edited to make it look that way).

It’s clear that the media would love for Biden to drop out of the 2024 race. The bias in reporting, from Fox and the Wall Street Journal to liberal MSNBC and The New York Times, is evident -- because “chaos” makes money. During the 2016 race, former head of CBS Les Moonves famously noted that Donald Trump was bad for America but great for the bottom line.

Despite Biden’s exceptional achievements, way too many in the pundit class now want to throw him overboard because of a ginned-up narrative. They set impossible standards to “prove” that he’s up to the job, completely ignoring Trump’s increasingly disturbing language and odd behavior.

The media downplays (or downright ignores) the threats posed by a second Trump term. Thankfully, more details have been coming out about Project 2025, the frightening, hard-right plan to overhaul the government should Trump regain office. It frequently gets short shrift in favor of more “tut-tutting” about Biden.

Most of us are aware of how today’s media is often manipulated to drive certain results. We’re flooded with social media Rage Farming, “anonymous sources,” deep fake videos, and newspapers or websites that look official. As we get ever closer to election day, it’s incumbent upon us to take even more charge over what we watch and read.

Start the pushback by taking every story, reporter or political pundit --even ones you’ve come to trust --with a huge grain of salt. The days of principled journalists like Murrow and Cronkite are long dead; today’s journalists have bosses and shareholders.

In the days after the first debate, a lot of people became disgusted with the media’s anti-Biden pile-on. A grassroots effort took hold to tell them to knock it off: subscriptions to the Times were cancelled, viewers turned off cable news channels. Actions like these are an effective way to hold them accountable. Here’s another good way to ensure you’re consuming reporting that’s accurate.

So now, it’s critical to do your due-diligence on your media sources. To paraphrase The Who, don’t get fooled again.

Cindy Grogan is a writer, lover of history and "Star Trek" (TOS), and hardcore politics junkie. There was that one time she campaigned for Gerald Ford (yikes), but ever since, she's been devoted to Democratic and progressive policies.