No Clothes

The media's narrative implodes

For the last few days, I’ve had the odd sensation that I watched a different debate than everyone else did. It’s not because I didn’t think Biden was terrible — he was clearly terrible — but because I expected him to be even worse.

My brother’s family came over to our house so we could watch the spectacle together, and had been listening to the beginning of it on the radio on the drive over. My sister-in-law showed up at our door with an expression on her face like somebody had just died. It was agonizing just to hear Biden talk, she said — and this was before she’d even been subjected to the visuals of Biden’s slack-jawed, dead-eyed, thousand-yard stare. “Really?” I responded. So far I’d actually been impressed, I said, that he hadn’t collapsed on stage or gone into a fugue state. I thought he was having an okay night.

It probably goes without saying that our expectations are largely a function of the media we consume. Before 2020, I got my news almost exclusively from The New York Times and the New Yorker, along with a half dozen left-wing online outlets. Everything started to change that year, as I watched a combination of Covid, George Floyd and Trump Derangement Syndrome transform millions of liberals into a weird, hysterical, reactionary secular religious cult. I began taking conservative reporting more seriously, and establishment media much less so. It was only a matter of time, however, before I became equally disenchanted with the “heterodox,” “IDW,” “post-left” subculture I’d fallen into, which has become less of an intellectual community and more of a TED Talks-style lifestyle brand. The right wing was even worse; especially since October 7, conservatives have become every bit as hypocritical as the woke left at the height of Black Lives Matter.

This wholesale disillusionment has left me in the paranoid position of assuming that every journalist is working an angle. Most of the time, that would amount to a lot of cheap cynicism, but it’s useful at the height of campaign season, when it happens to be true.

Biden’s dementia, or whatever it is, has been obvious to anyone who doesn’t keep a strict media diet of MSNBC, CNN and HuffPost. Certainly some of the clips of doddering Joe Biden on social media may be selectively edited or taken out of context. But the sheer volume of them speaks to the existence of an actual, flesh-and-blood thing that is happening in the world, not to a massive disinformation campaign by the Republican National Committee, as Joy Reid would have you believe. But if you voluntarily blinker yourself by mainlining MSNBC and experience acid reflux in the face of any narrative that diverges from Joe Scarborough’s teleprompter feed, you walked into your living room on Thursday evening wholly unprepared for the ambush of reality that awaited you on the TV screen.

Like Fox News for the other side, MSNBC’s job is to lie to people who wish to be lied to. This is was the question MSNBC’s Jen Psaki had for Gavin Newsom after Biden humiliated himself in front of 50 million people: “What should people out there who have social media platforms and like President Biden be pushing out there that was damaging and terrible from Donald Trump tonight?”

To be clear, this was the President’s former press secretary asking the President’s surrogate what script Biden loyalists should regurgitate to their friends and followers on the internet on behalf of the President’s re-election campaign. MSNBC had no qualms about airing this as “news.”

But even if you’ve never heard of Joy Reid, have no idea what channel carries MSNBC on your local cable provider, and subscribe to the actual paper copy of The New York Times, this is still the media ecosystem you inhabit. Just days before the debate, the Times ran a story on how voters’ doubts about Biden’s age are “conspiracy theories spiraling across social media” stoked by a right-wing disinformation campaign. A few days later, a Times cultural critic wondered whether Biden’s age was merely an “image problem,” and that instead of worrying over his decline, we ought instead to regard him “like Homer’s Nestor, Titian’s Farnese pope or Alec Guinness’s Jedi.” Then Biden stepped on stage in Atlanta looking more like Grampa Simpson than Obi Wan Kenobi, and the next morning the Times’ editorial board counseled Biden to step down, on account of his “age and infirmity.”

Over the 12 or so hours that followed the debate, we witnessed one of the most remarkable mass media spectacles since the propaganda campaign behind the drive to war in Iraq. The establishment’s narrative on Biden’s age — he’s privately “sharp”; it’s just a stutter; your eyes are being lied to by a right-wing conspiracy — collapsed in real time, and politicians and pundits instantaneously shape-shifted to accommodate themselves to the new reality. The Times’ Peter Baker compared it to “a run on the bank.” It was a psychic dam breaking. It was the collective admission of the emperor’s sycophants, backed into a corner, that he was, in fact, wearing no clothes.

Our media siloes are formidable, but they’re not omnipotent. Sometimes reality is so undeniable it actually breaks through. But the full reality may be concealed from us still. As bad as last Thursday was, it could have been even worse. I didn’t share the shock that much of Blue State America experienced last week for what I continue to believe is good reason: because Joe Biden did not actually have a bad night in Atlanta. He had a normal night. We haven’t even seen what bad looks like yet.