Turley: Say, why isn't the media talking about Biden's paranoid-conspiracy mongering?

Probably for the same reason the media won’t cover Tara Reade’s accusations against Joe Biden. To cover either story would potentially help Donald Trump, and that is something media outlets will go far out of their way to avoid. CBS legal analyst and center-left attorney Jonathan Turley raised the issue I covered on Friday, which is the former VP’s serial public allegations that Trump would somehow try to postpone or cancel the election in November.

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If any Republican of Biden’s stature started spreading such an easily debunked conspiracy theory, Turley wrote on Saturday, the media would be all over him. The silence on this subject speaks volumes about the status of our media, Turley argues:

If there are two words that have been the mantra in the media during the last three years with President Trump, they would be “conspiracy theory.” That label is a wonderful device to attack political opponents. It not only suggests something is objectively untrue but that the person responsible for it is unhinged and unreliable. When Republican members of Congress had suggested that the coronavirus might have come from a research lab in Wuhan, for instance, it was widely denounced as a conspiracy theory, even though some intelligence officials believe the theory is credible.

It is a term that is almost exclusively reserved in the media for Trump and his supporters. That was evident this week when the ultimate conspiracy theory was declared by the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, who warned that he was certain Trump plans to delay the election this fall. It is a conspiracy theory utterly without factual or constitutional support, yet his warning was deemed a “prediction” by Politico in a recent article. It has been peddled by various Democratic officials and commentators for months and is all the rage on the internet, even though it should be sold as a set including a tin foil hat and an electromagnetic ghost detector.

Biden left little doubt of such a plan by Trump. He said, “Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, and come up with some rationale why it cannot be held.” It is just the type of thing that a crazed guy in a tightly buttoned raincoat whispers to you on the subway. But Biden was not finished. If you attended a recent online fundraiser, you saw Biden grow uncomfortably close and go on to explain that it was the Postal Service which actually revealed the conspiracy theory to him.

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For more on that, check out the rest of Turley’s column, where he explains just how far down the rabbit hole Biden has fallen. To sum up, the Post Office has nothing to do with voting, and wouldn’t have any insight into Trump’s thinking on electoral strategy either. That’s especially true with this particular paranoid conspiracy theory, because it would be impossible for Trump to accomplish. The idea that a president can delay an election on his own has been repeatedly debunked, both here and at Snopes and even by Hillary Clinton earlier this month. Elections are scheduled by statute and would require Congress to pass a law delaying the election — and even if they did, it would have to take place soon after, because Trump’s term expires on January 20 regardless. A long enough delay would make the Speaker of the House acting president, and it seems very doubtful that Trump would want to put Nancy Pelosi in the White House.

In other words, this is Art Bell territory, but the media seems intently looking in every direction but at Biden’s jump into nuttiness. The same national media outlets that have a decided disinterest in Biden’s paranoia wasted no time shredding Senator Tom Cotton for suggesting the possibility that the COVID-19 virus might have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology a few weeks ago for supposed paranoia and racism, only to get veeeeerrrrrryyyy quiet when the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published a 2018 State Department memo citing WIV’s safety issues and predicting that it would trigger a pandemic similar to what we’re seeing now, specifically related to their work with bat-originated coronaviruses.

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That’s precisely the double standard that Turley highlights. Cotton got ridiculed for merely suggesting the possibility of a lab accident even though the media had no evidence that would have contradicted it. Biden spouts off an easily debunked allegation against Trump, and … *crickets*.

That’s not the only case of crickets either. On Saturday, more contemporaneous (albeit indirect) evidence supporting Tara Reade’s allegations that Biden committed sexual assault against her emerged. How many minutes did the five major Sunday shows use in discussing the former Biden aide’s accusation? Three guesses, and the GOP’s rapid-response team points out this double standard as well:

A stark pattern has emerged regarding the Reade allegations compared to how Democrats and the media weaponized some of the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh despite ZERO corroborating evidence.

Take the Julie Swetnick allegations for instance:

  • The day the Julie Swetnick story surfaced, CNN alone gave disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti 35 minutes across 3 primetime shows to attack Kavanaugh.
  • The Sunday following the Swetnick allegation dropping, she was mentioned 16 times on the shows.

Bottom Line: The mainstream media’s coverage of the Reade allegations has made it very clear: sexual assault allegations will be given wall to wall coverage if they are made against a prominent Republican, whether corroborating evidence exists or not. But allegations against Democrats will be swept aside, even if corroborating evidence to support the allegation exists.  The word “shameful” doesn’t even begin to describe this incredible pattern by our media.

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“Predictable” pretty much covers it, though.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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