It was the story that rocked the presidential race and led us to where we are now, with Kamala Harris facing off against Donald Trump. It presented a reality that most sentient beings already knew—that incumbent President Joe Biden was in severe mental decline and was in no position to run the country for four more years—but it was a reality that the Democrats and the mainstream media vehemently denied, buried, and ignored.
Journalist Olivia Nuzzi blew the lid off that narrative with a July 4 report titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden” with the subheading, “The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.” She's not known as a right-leaning author, and didn’t write this for RedState or any other conservative outlet—she penned it for New York Magazine, hardly a bastion of right-wing journalists.
But now she’s paying the price, according to Semaphore:
Bloomberg quietly killed a splashy PR rollout of Olivia Nuzzi’s new show, Working Capital, in response to a small Twitter campaign against the journalist by Democrats.
The interview show, announced with great fanfare in July, wound up being unceremoniously released on Bloomberg’s television network and is available online. But Max [Tani] reports (and Nuzzi confirms) that plans for a higher-profile rollout of the Bloomberg Originals bet were abruptly scotched after a Nuzzi article about the “conspiracy of silence” around President Joe Biden’s age.
RedState’s Bonchie covered Nuzzi’s original piece:
Greta Van Susteren, now an anchor for Newsmax TV, knows a thing or two about ticking off the leftist media:
If this is true, it goes to show the media truly has gone mad and has NO regard for free speech and 1st Amendment. Remember, @MSNBC fired me (and had to pay me full for 2 yr) because I would not in their words “play ball.”Instead I insisted on being honest . @Olivianuzzi pic.twitter.com/6IAeWIetTv
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) September 2, 2024
Hell hath no fury like the liberal media scorned.
The move to cancel Nuzzi came quickly after the article was published when leftists organized a campaign to discredit her over old social posts they deemed "racist," although Sempahore notes they were made in jest.
Her article prompted a group of Democrats on Twitter to call her a racist and tweet at Bloomberg demanding she be fired. They based their claims on some tweets from the Obama years which, if you had no sense of humor or hadn’t been following United States politics at the time, could be understood out of context as being expressions of furious anti-Obama sentiment. (They were, in fact, Twitter jokes. This is too dumb to explain in detail, but here’s a representative sample.)
Nuzzi was critical of Bloomberg's decision and reflected on how media corporations have gotten so scared of PR crises that they'll avoid anything that might be controversial:
“When I write something that agitates the right, I am accused of being a liberal activist. When I write something that agitates the left, I am accused of being a conservative activist. The difference is that mainstream media organizations tend to ignore bad-faith campaigns against reporters led by the right,” she observed.
My interpretation of that last sentence is that she's saying the media could care less if the right gets upset over something but will immediately play cleanup if the left gets their knickers in a twist. She continued:
“I have no illusions about massive corporate media entities and their tolerance for even the faintest murmurs of a PR crisis, so I can’t say I was surprised, but I was disappointed.”
Scoop w @maxwelltani: Bloomberg killed the PR rollout of Olivia Nuzzi's show after random Democrats on X upset about a Biden feature got mad at her about old, out-of-context jokes. Nuzzi's thoughtful response included:https://t.co/Rg8j0VUivV pic.twitter.com/STswyttNri
— Ben Smith (@semaforben) September 1, 2024
We write a lot about media bias here at RedState because, quite simply, it's a danger to our country. There would be no Joe Biden presidency if he didn't have 90 percent of the press cheerleading for him and lying to the public like they did about his mental decline, and Kamala would be polling in the teens if her campaign weren't propped up by the glowing, fangirl coverage she receives from most of the networks and the big-city newspapers.
Bloomberg just threw down the warning flag to other journalists out there: stray from the narrative at your own peril.
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