Joe Biden is out of it. Flummoxed, a gaffe machine, too old and out of touch. This is the narrative drum beat we have heard about Biden since he first announced his candidacy, and that has persisted even as he has consistently led in the polls against his Democratic rivals. Inevitably, president Donald Trump has joined in the insults, dubbing Biden "Sleepy Joe", and bragging about how much younger he feels than Biden. Of course, Trump is only three years younger than him, and. like Biden, he clearly seems to having trouble with his memory. Recently he stated that his father was born in Germany (he wasn't) and has claimed no less than six times publicly that he was once given the Michigan Man of the Year award, despite him never having received that award, which doesn't even actually exist(!). Imagine the mentality that not only dreams up an award for himself, and then boasts about it multiple times. Trump's verbal mistakes (of which these two are only prime examples of many) have been reported on by the media, but it seems that it is Biden more than Trump who is being tarred as having age related mental problems. Why does this image persist for Biden and not Trump?
While there are a number of factors, one big reason is that the right wing media can focus in on an issue and yell so loudly that it can pull the mainstream media along with it, until what was once a right wing talking point becomes the subject of serious journalism. And they've been playing this game for years.
Although there has always been a right wing media in America (from pro slavery pamphlets to the John Birch society), it first really took hold when Rush Limbaugh began broadcasting nationally in 1988; his mixture of childish insults, boasts, crazy conspiracy theories, misogyny and bigotry (which are echoed in Trump's rally speeches) sadly found a large audience, spawning a cottage industry of right wing radio personalities who seemed to compete with each other for the award of the most extreme conservative. From the start, these right wingers saw that they held an advantage by accusing the mainstream media of having a liberal bias, while blatantly having their own, realizing that if they ranted about issues loud enough and long enough, these issues could eventually make their way beyond their audience and into the mainstream media. Putting it simply, if you throw every possible glob of mud at your target, inevitably some of it is going to stick. It was a formula that Fox News also picked up and perfected shortly after it began broadcasting in 1996. While sometimes their pathetic attempts at finding scandals are laughable (Fox News once spent hours of broadcast time attacking then president Barack Obama for wearing a tan suit!), they often can successfully pull the whole country to the right even while only broadcasting to a few million people.
There was no better indication of this than in the 2016 election when the so called scandal around Hillary Clinton emails became a rallying point for the right wing media that led to multiple stories covering it in the mainstream media in the interest of "fairness". Meanwhile, negative stories about Trump (like say, the chicanery of Trump University, or his multiple bankruptcies) were ignored by the right wing media and only lightly covered by the mainstream media, leaving us with the spectacle of Clinton having to apologize more than once during the debates for her email kerfuffle, while Trump's numerous ethical and legal issues were glossed over. The right wing media successfully got the rest of the media world to conflate Clinton's scandal while deflating Trump's multiple scandals. And it worked like a charm.
The central dishonesty of the right wing media became apparent once Trump was elected: back in October of 2018 the New York Times reported that Trump was using unprotected iphones to make calls (despite his aides begging him to use secured land lines) in which he may have been discussing confidential national affairs. Those calls were almost certainly monitored by China and Russia. This is essentially the same national security related scandal that hurt Clinton so much. But this story never gained traction, entering into the ether of the new reality in America in which our president does whatever he wants without consequence and right wing media ignores or defends any potentially scandalous behavior by him and many of the mainstream media's stories seem to wind up being ignored by the public.
The influence of the right wing media has of course now reached the highest office in the land, with Trump repeating talking points from Fox News and often communicating with their onscreen personalities like Sean Hannity. At times, it seems that our president trusts the people on TV more than his own cabinet members! Is there any way that the influence of the right wing media can end? The only possible hopeful sign is that Trump's approval ratings have never crested over the 50% marker, and that as he leaves an a foul stench of bigotry and corruption over the Republican party for years to come, some of that stench will waft to the fawning members of the media who have refused to accurately report or discuss on the moral bankruptcy of his presidency. But for know we just have to get used to the fact that we have a president who veers between spouting his own lies and repeating the lies told on Fox News.
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