Photo by ABC via Getty Images
Oh, the horror — a journalist told the truth about Joe Biden’s obvious incapacity to serve another term as president!
The journo in question is ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who was caught in a candid camera shot saying on a Manhattan street “I don’t think [Biden] can serve four more years.”
This reportedly outraged Debra O’Connell, head of ABC’s news division, who allegedly told him “he is a newsman who is expected to be objective.” (The network denies this account.)
Where to start?
Stephanopoulos was a top Bill Clinton apparatchik before making a seamless transition into journalism; that’s plainly one reason Team Biden picked him to do a damage-control interview after Joe’s debate disaster (although it seems to have only done more damage).
George, in other words, is no right-wing hatchet man.
As for the whole “objectivity” thing . . . lefty journos spent the last eight years screeching that journalism cannot, must not and should not ever be “objective.”
Otherwise, it might help Trump.
Now that’s blown up in journos’ faces, they’ve seemingly turned on a dime.
And by the way, Deb — saying that Biden can’t serve four more years is objective.
It’s a cool-eyed statement of where the balance of probability lies, and it’s based on an ugly, glaring reality: Biden’s ever-faster slide into dementia.
That will remain true even though Stephanopoulos has apologized for being honest (reportedly another O’Connell demand).
There’s a dark, hilarious irony here.
Thanks in large part to the insane insistence of people like O’Connell that all was well with Biden’s health, Joe managed to scrape along — until it became impossible.
And now establishment media and the Democratic Party (but we repeat ourselves) find themselves forced to repudiate their earlier claims that the prez is A-OK while demanding that audiences and voters keep on trusting them.
Lots of luck with that.
What to know about the fallout from President Biden’s debate performance:
- President Biden’s poor performance in the first 2024 presidential debate has left even some Democrats unsure of his fitness for office and future as the party’s candidate.
- Former President Barack Obama admitted that Biden had a “bad” debate, while his rival former President Donald Trump suggested that he was in a “trance” and “choked.”
- Biden told a crowd at a North Carolina rally the day after the debate that he doesn’t “debate as well as I used to” — but insisted that he can still “do this job.”
- The New York Times editorial board called on the president to serve the country by dropping out of the race. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a similar editorial a day later.
- Biden gathered with his family at Camp David to assess the campaign’s future, with his son Hunter reportedly pushing for him to stay in the race. Family members questioned whether the president’s top advisers should be fired after the disastrous debate.
- In a pre-taped interview with ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, Biden claimed that his “bad episode” at the debate was the result of a cold and not any cognitive issues.
- Biden has rejected calls for him to step down from fellow Democrats, insisting to Stephanopoulos that he is the most qualified to win the election. At a Wisconsin rally, he declared that he is “running and going to win again.”
Media world needs more of Stephanopoulos’ blunt honesty, not less.
Not least because it might have averted the current disaster.