From the depths of hell they come for vengeance*

(*An old computer game reference, apologies.) But after Joe Biden's debate debacle, the reporters who've licked his boots for four years are suddenly in truth-telling mode. Here's why.

Even if you don’t like Joe Biden, the headlines and articles are almost painful.

In the aftermath of last week’s Presidential debate, the elite media has gone from carrying water for Biden to turning the firehose on him.

The New York Times: Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome

Politico: ‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate

Reuters: Joe Biden's disastrous debate blamed on bad preparation, exhaustion

What is so striking about these articles is that only days ago - not months, but days - the same outlets insisted questions about Biden’s cognitive fitness were not merely unfair but “misinformation.” (A word and concept that must be retired immediately. Facts that one side or the other do not like are not “misinformation.”)

To wit, on June 21, less than a week before the debate, the New York Times ran this howler of an article: How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts

The piece claimed that footage of a clearly addled Biden on trips to Europe were “distorted” and “twisted mundane moments to paint him in an unflattering light.”

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(It is YOUR support that enables me to tell the truths the media won’t.)

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Yesterday, the Times described the European trips very differently:

He seemed confused at points during a D-Day anniversary ceremony in France on June 6…

A senior European official who was present [at Biden’s visit to the G-7 summit in Italy] said that there had been a noticeable decline in Mr. Biden’s physical state since the previous fall and that the Europeans had been “shocked” by what they saw.

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(Now they tell themselves)

SOURCE

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Biden has essentially no support in the elite media left, with the arguable exception of Washington Post, his most faithful ally, an outlet that rode its commitment to wokeism to a $77 million loss last year.

How did this happen? How did the media turn so quickly on him?

Three main factors are driving this shift.

First, Biden’s failure last week was too obvious and embarrassing to argue.

The elite media has already suffered several similar debacles since 2020 when it has declared subjects off-limits and unpleasant facts about them “misinformation.”

The declaration that the lab-leak theory was racist and the bizarre claim that the damming material on Hunter Biden’s laptop was somehow faked come to mind. (Put the failure of the mRNA vaccines aside, as that issue is still contested - although the public rejection of boosters suggests the reality has seeped in).

But this failure was at a new level.

An entire reporting apparatus exists to cover the White House and the President. Yet it seems to have spent the last four years completely missing his decline - a decline that was obvious to nearly everyone else. (This is not hindsight. I wrote about the Hur report in February and again after the videos came out.)

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The failure to cover the President’s decline will do more to damage the media’s credibility than anything yet has - and it has precious little credibility left.

Fury over that fact means the media will show Biden no quarter.

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Second, this betrayal is personal.

Washington is less a swamp than an incestuous little cesspool, particularly on the left. Most reporters are Democrats. Most of them openly or privately supported Biden’s election and have been going easy on him for four years.

I mocked this tendency in a tweet the day after Biden’s 2021 inauguration:

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And so the reporters covering the White House believed - or wanted to believe - that they could trust this administration, that both its goals and values aligned with theirs and that it wouldn’t lie to them.

They forgot that they weren’t on the same team. The courtiers inside the White House care about their own power, which is contingent on the man in charge. If Biden goes, they do too. And so they will lie - and have lied - to protect him. Because protecting him is protecting themselves.

And so along with the institutional danger, a sense of personal betrayal is driving the response.

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(Out with the old (media), in with the new. For 20 cents a day!)

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Third, of course, is the fact that these folks still hate Donald Trump, hate him more than ever, in fact. They viewed Biden as a firewall, a way to hold the Democratic Party together until its next generation could arrive - or at the least until 2028, when Trump would be 82, too old to run. (Oh the irony.)

Now they know better.

Biden is probably the weakest major candidate the Democrats can field, with the possible exception of Kamala Harris. All the major state governors would have a better shot, probably even Gavin Newsom.

Biden and his administration have destroyed the media’s credibility and betrayed reporters personally - all to make more likely the election of a man they hate.

No wonder they’re furious.

And Joe Biden is about to see what it’s like when the media really turns on you, in a way that no Democratic President has since Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968.

It’s no accident that LBJ didn’t get to run for a second term (either).