Have you noticed that most of mainstream media outlets seem to downplay Biden’s accomplishments, or at least portray them in a doomsday light? For instance, this from Eric Boehlert’s last post before his tragic death last Monday:
• “America’s Job Market Is On Fire. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Feel Like It” (CNN)
• “Booming Job Growth Is a Double-Edged Sword For Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Why a Great Jobs Report Can’t Save Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Unemployment Hits Pandemic Low in March, But Uncertainty Looms Ahead” (Washington Post)
• “Biden Gets a Strong Jobs Report, But a Sour Mood Still Prevails” (Washington Post)
Boehlert reported that Like clockwork, the first Friday of the month brought another blockbuster jobs report. The U.S. economy under President Joe Biden added another 400,000-plus new jobs in March, it was announced last week.
Biden is currently on pace, during his first two full years in office, to oversee the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate tumbling all the way down to 3 percent. That would be an unprecedented accomplishment in U.S. history. Context: In four years in office, Trump lost three million jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.
The U.S. economy under Biden has been adding more than 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months.
And yet, he asks, The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)
Regarding Hunter Biden, he said The press can’t find anything illegal or shocking, so they pretend that the business deals themselves are newsworthy and that Hunter’s career requires years of media digging. Meanwhile, the recent revelation about a Supreme Court Justice’s wife strategizing with the Trump White House to overturn an election has evaporated from most newsrooms in less than one week.
After years of media focus there’s nothing to suggest Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings or profited from them in any way, or that the senior Biden ever did anything remotely unethical in connection with Hunter’s career. The son has never run for office, never served in the government, never lobbied to change U.S. policy, and never acted as an advisor to his father in any way.
Boehlert—who wrote about music and the music industry for Rolling Stone and Billboard before beginning a career in political journalism with five years as a staff writer at Salon, followed by 10 years as a senior fellow at Media Matters for America—was a “fierce and fearless defender of journalism” according to his wife, Tracy Breslin. Journalist Soledad O’Brien wrote that Boehlert’s death was “A terrible loss. We’ve lost an awesome human being, handsome/cool/witty dude who kicked ass on our behalf.” She added that he had a “crazy devotion to facts, context and good reporting,” who was an “enemy of BS, fake news.”
And Lee Papa (the Rude Pundit) got in on the act last week with his post Democrats Should Go on the Offensive By Celebrating Accomplishments.
He laid out three major accomplishments to chew on:
1. I've said this before, but it deserves repeating: The 2020 election was a miracle, one that should give us national pride. In the midst of a global pandemic, at a point when cases were surging, despite all kinds of obstacles, the 2020 election went amazingly smoothly for the vast majority of Americans (that is, the ones who weren't forced to spend hours in line because of state incompetence or hostility to voting). By Donald Trump's own Department of Homeland Security's assessment, it was "the most secure in American history," with more people voting and no increase in the rejection of ballots despite the surge in mail-in voting.
2. The United States played a big role in getting a vaccine against Covid-19 done in record time, which is the only reason we can even pretend that the pandemic is over (which it definitely is not). And I'm not just talking about the creation of the vaccine. The rollout of the vaccination program has been astonishing with 563 million shots given in the United States in about 15 months, 11.3 billion shots around the world. Even acknowledging the need to do more in Africa and elsewhere and the intransigence of anti-vaxxers, that's a stunning pace.
3. And after the American economy was wrecked by Covid, the unemployment rate is now down to 3.6%, with wages rising more quickly than they had been. There are always caveats: wages should be higher, and inflation due to mostly worldwide factors makes those wage gains worth less. But people are working, and they are getting hired at rates we simply haven't seen in decades. We've gotten back 93% of the jobs lost in the pandemic shutdown. That's an incredible turnaround.
He goes on to say The only way Republicans and their allied media could tear these things down is to outright lie about them. Despite what Republicans say, there wasn't widespread voter or election fraud or misconduct. The vaccine prevents hospitalization and death and isn't experimental. And the economy is doing great and isn't remotely a communist nightmare. And the lies worked. They made a large portion of the United States hate these accomplishments by creating a narrative about insidious incompetence, putting Democrats on the defensive, attempting to respond to the GOP narrative, which drowned out the successes.
And the Republicans call it the Liberal Media? I’ll have to add to that list of accomplishments; 1) landing Ketanji Brown Jackson as a justice on the Supreme Court, 2) his $1.2 trillion infrastructure package which drastically increased investment in the national network of bridges and roads, airports, public transport, national broadband internet, as well as waterways and energy systems, 3) highest appointment of federal judges since Reagan, 4) his issue of an executive order to overturn Trump-era ban on openly transgender members of the U.S. military (in his first week at the White House!), the American Rescue Plan, and 5) his persistence in unifying NATO as Russia continues to embark its will upon Ukraine…all of this in a time in which he has sought to respond to a long and hugely daunting list of unprecedented global and national crises, and while his party has clung to congressional majorities that have constantly wobbled between razor thin and nonexistent; think Manchin and Sinema.
What to do? For one, no matter what, vote!
And by the way, what does it take to get a little jail time for white folk ‘round here? Let’s kidnap a Governor!
And now…