It begins with the prototypical “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” decision by ABC News to bury the lede with a deceptive headline in an effort to minimize Joe Biden’s botching of his White House tenure. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll had resulted in a stunning move away from Biden to Trump, showing the latter with a landslide level 51-42 lead if the 2024 election were held today. ABC’s headline: “Troubles for Biden not just his age in reelection campaign: POLL.”
This is a now common tool of the fake news game for those with the integrity to call it what it is: deceitful headlining to hide news that the media wants as little noticed as possible. The defensive rejoinder is always, “Oh, but that’s just the headline!”, but much of the public only skims the news and thus never sees more than the headlines of most stories. ABC News knows it, and when there have been stories that it (or other MSM propagandists for the Democrats) deems unhelpful to the cause, it uses this trick if not one of the other ones, like not reporting the story at all. Since this was ABC’s own poll, that one wasn’t an option.
Sure, the poll spelled “troubles” for Biden rather than just his age, as if anyone paying attention thought being old was the main problem with President Biden. But that’s not what the poll results indicate: they indicate that the public realizes that Biden has been a disaster as POTUS, and are pulling away from him at an accelerating rate. Bad polls affect party confidence, enthusiasm, morale and donations: that’s why most pollsters, who tend to be biased toward the Left like the media organizations that hire them, tend to skew poll results against Republicans. The honest headline for this poll would have been what was significant about it: “HOLY CRAP, A POLL RUN BY ABA AND THE POST STILL SHOWED TRUMP CLOBBERING BIDEN IN 2024! ARRRGH!!!” except that ABC’s partisan hacks didn’t want that to be the reaction in Trump Derangement Land.
Well, it turned out that this fake news stunt was a bit too obvious, and it received widespread mockery. The news media wants to keep up the myth that it isn’t biased, sort of like organized crime figures and their families insist that the Mafia doesn’t exist, so ABC quietly replaced the headline above with this one: “Trump edges out Biden 51-42 in head-to-head matchup: POLL.” There’s still misinformation there, because these hacks can’t help themselves: “edges out” means “to defeat or do better than someone or something else by a small amount.” 9% is not a small “edge” in a Presidential election: that was the margin by which Reagan beat Carter in 1980, when Ron won 489 electoral votes to Jimmy’s 49. These people just can’t play it straight; they are unethical and biased to the core.
I need to make it clear right now that the poll itself is of minor interest as far as guessing what the results in November 2024 might be. The election is too far away; the number of unanticipated things that could happen (or predictable things, like Trump saying something so outrageous and scary that it sets off head explosions coast to coast) are too many. However, the poll does provide an answer to the standard ethics question “What’s going on here?”
That answer is that whatever the news media and Democrats and progressives and their henchpersons in social media, Big Tech and Hollywood have been doing the past three years to ensure that Trump can not return to power isn’t only not working, it’s backfiring. The multiple indictments and contrived “Get Trump” efforts by Democratic prosecutors and the FBI is being seen as what it is, and much of the public, thank God, resents and rejects it.
The double standards that have seen drunken rioters at the Capitol severely punished by D.C. juries and Democrat prosecutions while Democratic DAs across the country are releasing felons and letting real crime explode are resonating; the favoritism shown by Biden’s law enforcement officials to his son while Trump is being hounded for his “baseless” accusations that the last election was “stolen” stinks of third world dictatorships. All of Trump’s implacable foes have forfeited credibility with their excesses, which means they have lost power. Trump himself is no more popular than he ever was, but his opposition, including the news media, has damaged this nation, its institutions and its civic health so grievously since 2016 that it is largely understood as the threat to the nation that it is.
ABC was trying to hide the truth in a panic, like Sharon Key pathetically hiding in the bushes after stabbing her one-year-old niece in a drunken rage. Right now, the Axis of Unethical Conduct doesn’t know what else to so, and it is terrified.
Ethics Alarms 
Even the legacy media aren’t buying the Biden Administration’s claim that mass, undeterred and unimpeded illegal immigration is not really happening and the border is secure. Lots of middle class working voters are winderibfvwhtvthe Administration is giving temporary worker status to Venezuelans and other illegal aliens conpeting for their jobs.
jvb
Right John. How is granting illegals in NYC work permits the solution to anything? A mystery.
Well, that was awful:
“Lots of middle class working voters are winderibfvwhtvthe Administration is giving temporary worker status to Venezuelans and other illegal aliens conpeting for their jobs” should read:
“Lots of middle class working voters are WONDERING WHY THE BIDEN Administration is giving temporary worker status to Venezuelans and other illegal aliens COMPETING for their jobs”.
Sometimes, the keyboard is just too small. Or maybe I need new contacts. Sheesh.
jvb
Thanks for clarifying that. I’ll often fix obvious typos in comments, but that one stumped me. I thought it might be Danish or something.
That’s a relief; I thought perhaps Bidenlalia was contagious. My second guess was that it was just a bit of RUSH lyrics.
Is the ghost of J. Edgar back in charge at the FBI? Can they do anything now competently and/or without tainting the results?
https://www.foxnews.com/media/fbi-sued-allegedly-losing-hundreds-thousands-rare-coins-during-raid
They turned it all wrong. Either they should have started early so that they could have gotten some convictions in, or they should have waited so that Trump would be defending himself while trying to campaign. You are correct, however, the whole thing is starting to backfire and reveal the Democratic Party as the nascent totalitarians that they are. I’d like to say that this nation didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left it, but I’m not sure that’s true. At least since the days of Woodrow Wilson, that party has been all about getting more power and essentially ignoring the opposition.
I used to think highly of FDR as many of us are taught, but the fact is that the man governed as an elected King, tried to pack the Supreme court, and did not have the wisdom to step aside when he knew he was dying. Harry Truman did stand up to the Soviets in the early stages of the Cold War, but there’s also a reason he was the least popular president since they started keeping popularity ratings. Most people don’t remember that he could have run again in 1952 if he had wanted to, but he decided to step aside because he knew he would probably face a humiliating defeat.
Since then, what has the party produced? Early bro JFK and his attempt to build the dynasty his father could not, tyrannical bully and terrific racist LBJ, incompetent Jimmy Carter, serial sexual assaulter Clinton, empty suit Obama, and now Biden, who is publicly falling apart and there is no longer any way to hide it and whose minions attempt to shovel shit in our mouths and tell us it’s chocolate pudding. With each Democratic president we see an attempt to further consolidate power at the federal level, but now it is reaching the point where they either don’t know or don’t care that it’s an obvious power grab. They are even trying to grab power away from parents to make sure that the next generation goes up as good little Democratic voters who never do anything other than vote to ratify the status quo.
All the while, the media has done their level best to give this party all the cover it can. There isn’t a single thing Trump did but did not receive terrible press, nor is there a single thing that Biden has done that did not receive good press. I never thought I’d live to see the day when the United States started to become like the Soviet Union which it vanquished. It used to be that we agreed that a one-party state with tight governmental control of everything was a bad thing. Now, it looks like large swaths of the country, mostly the blue part, think that one party state is ideal, and that the press and education need to be tightly controlled to prevent the spread of “misinformation.”. I might even call this medieval, because in the Middle ages and for some time afterwards the Bible was only written in Latin, and so were the laws in the UK until the time of Richard III (who is cast as a villain but did end the practice of making laws not understandable by ordinary people). The idea was that ordinary people would not be able to understand either without ecclesiastical guidance, so to know what was expected of you you had to go to the educated class, who were firmly in the pocket of the ruling class. Each time they told you the same thing: work hard, obey, and don’t ask questions. That is exactly what they are telling us now: work hard, do as you’re told, don’t ask questions, speak the slogan of the day. They also throw in a generous amount of what would be considered abuse for a spouse: I hate you because you deserve to be hated, but if you do as you’re told consistently, I might hate you just a little less, and that’s about the best you can hope for or should hope for.
This is a Comment of the Day, and I’ll apologize right now, Steve, for not posting it as one, though it deserves it. The reason is that I am half-way through—more, in fact—a post of my own about how re-watching Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts” greatly clarified “what’s going on” as we head to ’24 to a remarkable degree. Teddy explains a great deal of Trump’s continuing appeal (though Trump is a flea compared to TR in all respects) and watching FDR’s reign unfold greatly explains the conduct (and rot) of the Democratic Party since—in much the way the just described. You largely nailed half the post.
Hell, I may post it as a COTD anyway. A nice problem to have…smart and perceptive readers.
I’ve come to despise Ken Burns. He’s the official myth maker of the left. His view of American history is based on whatever photos he can find in the Time LIFE archives.
That’s a bit harsh. Burns doesn’t write most of his documentaries, and until the recent Holocaust piece, where he went off the rails into irrelevant and contrived Trump-bashing, he has educated a lot of the upper half of the US IQ scale (the other half is too busy watching realty shows). In the Roosevelt series, the leftist bias is there (FDR was a greater than great President who pursued social justice, etc,. but the bad stuff is there too: it’d not buried. George Will, who is not a fan of the nanny state features that FDR introduced, is a frequent talking head. And including Eleanor’s story makes it clear that FDR was an SOB, a sociopath, a liar and a user…meaning the template for the Great Democratic Party Prez is an SOB, a sociopath, a liar and a user who would have kept himself in office for another decade if he had lived that long. It’s all there. Burns just soft-peddles it.
He just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Even (particularly?) his baseball series. He creates the impression American society has a uniform, homogenous culture which just happens to be totally leftist in its hopes and aspirations. And we’ll all be just fine as long as we take everything he says to heart and understand how things really work. And people swoon over his stuff. Harsh, yes, but the guy is essentially maudlin.
“Now, it looks like large swaths of the country, mostly the blue part, think that one party state is ideal.”
Steve, I’d say that was the thinking at least as far back as the early 1970s in the Northeast. I was in college in upstate NY among mostly NYC and Long Island kids from 1969 to 1973, and then in New Haven, CT and then outside Boston, MA from 1973 through 1975. The leftism was monolithic at that point in time. And having just attended my fiftieth college reunion this past June, nothing has changed other than the monolith has become more calcified. The smugness is complete and impenetrable. They all know best. Life is a continual “teaching moment” for the unenlightened.
I’ve always been baffled that many Americans respected and heaped praise on FDR. His obvious autocratic tendencies aside (if nothing else, being the first to attack the separation of powers and out system of checks and balances when he threatened to pack the supreme court), his economic policy was utter crap, and most likely extended the economic woos of the Great Depression by many years. It was WWII that saved the US economy. On top it, his push for centralized governance, and the huge expansion of the federal government, set us on the path to the situation we’re in right now, and set terrible example for bad state governance. Oh, and he has a raging racist, and adulterer (until he was paralyzed).
I wonder whether it was less FDR who created the current Federal state, or World War Two which brought the military industrial complex into being to win the War, and then never went away that ended up creating the current Federal state. Military spending and an aggressive foreign policy keep things focused in D.C. and provided oodles of cash to keep everyone happy. An unappealing aspect of the desire to not replicate the defense blunders of the 1930s?
Oh, don’t be baffled. FDR probably saved the nation from a revolution until the war came. It was his rhetoric, the sense of caring, the programs and the masterful sense of hope that he conveyed. He once told an aide that if he failed, he would be the last President, and he may have been right. He was almost a computer-designed Perfect President (except for the walking part), and that made him both the perfect leaders for the crisis and a scary template for US dictatorships.
Let us keep in mind that polls don’t matter. Controlling the polling places and the ballot boxes and the “mail in ballots” is what matters. The Dems will be able to deliver the goods on election night and the next morning.
But they do matter. If there was substantial vote-cheating in 2024, it was easy to deny it because the polls all had Biden winning by larger margins than he ultimately did. If the voting really seems to be out of whack with the polls, the outrage and suspicion will be much, much more serious, even violent.
Agreed. I was just thinking if the Dems succeed in stealing another presidential election, all hell could very well literally break loose.