Media Is Finally Starting to Acknowledge That Joe Biden Is a Mess

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Mainstream media has largely defended Biden. While we’ve seen the issues with Biden since before he came into office, suddenly, it seems the rest of the media are acknowledging the issues on a general scale. The problem is that reality has caught up with them, and Americans aren’t having it anymore — they see the truth.

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From Fox News:

“It has been most interesting to see the establishment media try to adjust its coverage of the Biden administration. Mainstream media helped run cover for Biden in the 2020 campaign and for the early months of his administration,” DePauw University journalism professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital.

“But the media narrative that Biden was a unifier and that any national problems were just Trump leftovers just had to disintegrate in the face of cold reality,” McCall said. “Even the left-of-center media have had to grudgingly acknowledge that the Biden administration is struggling.”

McCall believes media credibility is “already quite dismal” and continued promotion of Biden has become unworkable when public opinion polling indicates that Americans see the administration’s problems.

“In a sense, the mainstream media is just now figuring out what the public has known for months,” he said.

Ah, no, a lot of the media knew, they just aren’t able to spin the facts anymore. And the messaging from the Biden team has gotten even worse since former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki left. The media is frustrated with her replacement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

When Biden made up a despicable lie about getting an appointment to the Naval Academy in front of naval graduates, Jean-Pierre’s response was that she hadn’t heard him say it so she couldn’t speak to it — even though it was on video and in the White House transcript of the event.

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When Jean-Pierre was asked who first briefed Joe Biden about the baby formula shortage problem, she refused to answer as though it were some big secret. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell scolded her during the interaction.

“To say there is no specific person is not a satisfactory answer. When you have senior assistants to the president, there’s a paper trail, I’m sure, about briefings to the president. There is a domestic policy council. There’s a chief of staff. At some point we need to know who would have been the most likely person to talk to him,” O’Donnell said.

Jean-Pierre continued to dodge the question and the NBC News reporter fired back, “It just looks like it’s evasive” to not have senior White House aides come forward and admit they briefed the president on the baby formula shortage.

“We’re also trying to understand the information flow in this White House, and it’s important for us to get that answer, which is where we’re going to keep asking it until we get that answer,” O’Donnell said.

Unfortunately for the Biden team, there have been multiple other such interactions and they’re not going over well, with the public or the media now.

McCall admits “trying to put a happy face on so many administration problems” is a difficult task for Jean-Pierre, but she’s “coming off as overmatched while trying to rationalize policy failures.”

“Saying ‘I did not see that part of the speech’ or ‘I can’t speak to that’ just won’t cut it in front of a press corps that might finally be awakening to its responsibility to thoroughly scrutinize the Biden White House,” McCall said.

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We saw his team even claim that he came up with the “ultra-MAGA” expression that he hoped to attack Republicans with. Except then it was revealed that he had operatives including Anita Dunn working on it for six months. On top of it, it was just a truly dumb take to accentuate the branding of your opponents. Even the liberal Fox co-host Geraldo Rivera said, “Biden has such difficulty communicating that even his nicknames, his smears, are ineffective.”

This on top of reports of division in the White House with multiple staff heading for the exits and Biden himself melting down over the polls that show his approval numbers are lower than those of President Donald Trump, whose bad numbers were largely a part of media attacks as opposed to Biden’s which are well earned and just keep getting worse.

They tried to blame it on the “messaging.”

“Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets,” NBC News wrote. “Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters’ confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say.”

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The problem, of course, isn’t just the messaging, but the bad policies and the bad messenger at the top of the food chain.

NBC and CNN termed Biden caught “flat-footed” on things like inflation and the baby formula shortage, as though he had no hand in things. NBC even said that Ron Klain might even leave after the midterms and be replaced by Anita Dunn. That just made him look weaker.

Then they seemed to blame it on the aides.

Hours after NBC News’ report was published, the Washington Post published a piece headlined, “White House scrambles on inflation after Biden complains to aides,” that claimed Biden “fumes privately that [the] administration isn’t doing enough to show concern on high prices.”

“The White House launched a new push Tuesday to contain the political damage caused by inflation after President Biden complained for weeks to aides that his administration was not doing enough to publicly explain the fastest price increases in roughly four decades,” the Post framed its report that appeared to largely give Biden a pass on inflation but admitted the president is “struggling to show that at least he understands that Americans are suffering and is doing what he can.”

Then on Thursday, CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere followed suit with a piece on “deeper dysfunction among White House aides.” The CNN report began by noting White House staffers monitor which media outlets cover the president, particularly which TV networks carry his speeches live, “realizing a number of times that the answer was none.” One anonymous aide told CNN, “You are thinking… why are we doing this?”

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Meanwhile, CNN says Biden is still trying to figure out how to act in the office, despite being vice president behind Obama for eight years — that he still wants to address issues “while also being the looser, happier, more sympathetic, lovingly Onion-parody inspiring, aviator-wearing, vanilla chip cone-licking guy — an image that was the core of why he got elected in the first place.”

One aide told CNN’s reporter, “[Biden] has to speak to very serious things… and you can’t do that getting ice cream.”

Dovere then swiped at Biden and his team by writing, “The President is a 79-year-old man who still thinks in terms of newspaper front pages and primetime TV programs, surrounded by not-quite-as-senior aides in senior positions with the same late 1990s media diet. Lifelong habits don’t tend to fade when people get to their desks in the West Wing.”

What a mess.

But everyone knew that Joe Biden was a gaffe machine and not fit for the office. It isn’t about being the ice cream guy, it’s about being the competent guy. Unfortunately, he has never been that and it’s showing, in glaring ways now.

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