Summertime, and the reporting is bad

For some reason, legacy media failures rise with the heat: lockdowns, lab leaks, and George Floyd in 2020, mRNA jab failure in 2021, Biden's fiasco in 2024, Graham Platner's disgrace now. What's next?

How could they have missed this?

How could they ALL have missed it? I need to get it out. NOW.

I’ve had that thought before. But never for a story about the President of the United States, a man covered by hundreds of news organizations.

Saturday, July 6, 2024. I was searching White House visitor logs for potential physician visits to Joe Biden - and finding, to my shock, that a Parkinson’s disease specialist had come to the West Wing repeatedly.

Biden’s infirmities and cognitive decline had been obvious for years. (In October 2023, federal prosecutor Robert K. Hur found Biden unable to recall when he had served as vice-president or his son Beau had died.)

Yet even as Biden’s decline became clearer, the legacy media went the other way, arguing the videos of him wandering off or freezing in silence were manipulated. Ultimately, the spin and half-truths blew up on June 27, 2024, when Biden froze during his debate with Donald Trump, famously stammering “We finally beat Medicare” to the world. (We sure did!)

Even then, the legacy media hesitated, maybe from embarrassment at how badly it had failed its most basic job, reporting on the fitness of the man in the Oval Office, maybe from residual loyalty to Biden or dislike of Trump.

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(Never hesitating. Never afraid of the truth. With your help.)

And don’t forget, $300 gets you the world’s finest* poker chip!

Not… actually… guaranteed to be the finest!

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So it was that the White House visitor logs remained untouched, until the New York Post reported on a single visit by Dr. Kevin Cannard, and I checked them and found the rest. (I was familiar with them. I’d pored through them for visits from Pfizer chairman Albert Bourla or other Pfizer officials to the Biden Administration in 2021.)

Two days later, The New York Times picked up my piece — without crediting me, to my complete lack of surprise. The rest is history.

Biden certainly would have had to drop out with or without the reporting on Cannard’s visits, which to this day no one has adequately explained, but they made clear just how badly the legacy media had failed in covering him.

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(I have no idea where I am. Or who I am. We definitely beat Medicare, though.)

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I thought of these media profiles in cowardice again this week, as Graham Platner, a Democrat running for Senate from Maine, faced highly credible allegations of sexual misconduct and assault.

Obviously, a single senator is far less important than the President. But Platner has received more than his share of media attention this year, and his case has a lot in common with Biden’s. Both times, legacy and left-leaning reporters simply refused to follow obvious lines of reporting — and ultimately embarrassed themselves badly.

Why did anyone care about Platner? Because he was 2026’s Great White Hope for the Democrats.

He checks all the boxes. He’s white (duh!), he’s a Marine, he’s an oyster farmer (ish), he’s young, he’s decent-looking without being, umm, suspiciously handsome, and he’s not Jewish (Josh Shapiro cannot say the same).

In fact, Platner is so not Jewish that he had a giant Nazi-themed tattoo inked on his chest in 2007 in Croatia. When reports of the tattoo emerged last year, Platner claimed he didn’t know what it meant. Sure. It not like Croatia was a hotbed of Nazi support during World War 2, no tattooist there would have any idea what a skull-and-crossbones SS emblem meant.

The tattoo was only one in a veritable parade of red flags that popped up almost the moment Platner began running for Senate last year. At some point, these stopped proving Platner’s authenticity and instead became signs of something much darker, something far more than routine political narcissism.

Yet the media ignored the obvious and repeated evidence of what can only be called Platner’s sociopathy and violent streak, just as it had ignored the obvious and repeated evidence of Biden’s dementia.

The fact that Biden and Platner are both white men with a perceived appeal to working-class white guys is no coincidence. Democrats and the media have been desperate for a decade to find a candidate who can talk white dude jive (they’re biting today, bro, let’s get some Nattys and take that Prowler of yours out) and bridge what they have convinced themselves is a cultural gap.

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(Welcome to the Lake of the Ozarks! Nazi tattoo not required!)

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This attitude is condescending and snobbish.

In fact, working-class white men have lots of very real pocketbook reasons to dislike the progressive left’s economic policies.

To name just four:

Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies based on race put them last in hiring;

Decarbonization efforts are a direct attack on many working-class jobs in energy and transportation;

Blue-state restrictive zoning and anti-growth policies cost even more homebuilding and trades jobs;

The Biden Administration tried to give college graduates a trillion-dollar subsidy by canceling student-loan debt.

Further, Medicare For All, the great beacon of progressive politics, has at best minor appeal for most young men. On average men under 50 make little use of healthcare; many (correctly) see Medicare expansion as likely to create yet another massive tax-funded entitlement.

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This isn’t to say that all Republican policies — before or during the Trump presidency — benefit the working class. Some do, some don’t.

But it’s far easier for the legacy media, Hollywood, academia, and Democrats to pretend that (white) working-class men just aren’t smart enough to see and protect their own economic interests — and that if they could just get the right (faux) working-class hero in place, Dustin and Lucas would happily support the left!

Biden was the old-man version of this, Platner the young. And it connects directly to the believe-in-science snobbery of 2020 and 2021, which has held up less than perfectly.

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Platner will likely drop out of the Senate race very soon.

Even if he doesn’t, I’m not going to chase his story the way I chased Biden’s. I have too many other topics to follow, and one senatorial race simply doesn’t rate. (And, frankly, if the people of Maine elect this guy after what has already come out, the United States is in deep trouble.)

But what seems clear after the last six years is that the legacy media simply cannot course-correct. Even the failure to question the President’s obvious cognitive decline two years ago could not keep left-leaning reporters for falling for the shiny object that was Graham Platner.

These media failures will keep happening.

And independent voices matter more than ever.

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(The 2024 piece. Paywalled — subscribe here to read)