The media cared about Donald Trump’s lies, but they don’t care about Joe Biden’s — as Matt Welch, a detractor of Donald Trump who never voted for Trump, notes in Reason magazine:
“When I took office,” President Joe Biden tweeted Monday, “our economy was on the brink of collapse.” This statement is false. As the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported one week after Biden was sworn into office, real Gross Domestic Product in the United States, after increasing by 33.4 percent in the third quarter of 2020, showed a preliminary increase of 4 percent for the last quarter of Donald Trump’s presidency. “After a year in which a pandemic and politics posed challenges unlike the U.S. has seen in generations,” CNBC reported, “the economy closed 2020 in fairly good shape.” Wall Street hit across-the-board all-time highs on Inauguration Day. Vaccination for COVID-19, seen by many as the critical component to restarting the economy after the first-half recession of 2020, was just then starting to roll out.
By fabricating a then-imminent economic calamity, Biden could attempt to claim credit for averting it. Neat! But it’s also the kind of political deception you would think that professional journalism, particularly in this age of heightened “moral clarity,” would be sensitively attuned to detect and criticize. Well, you would be wrong. A Google News search on the phrases “Biden,” “economy,” and “brink of collapse,” produces zero mainstream news articles….
And Biden at this stage in his presidency is repeatedly saying things that aren’t true. At his big omicron speech and mini-press conference last week, the president, when asked a question about Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.V.), who had just signaled his opposition to Biden’s signature Build Back Better legislation, said, “Joe went on TV today and—I don’t know if it was TV or not; I’m told he was speaking to the liberal caucus in the House and said, ‘Joe Biden didn’t mislead you, I misled you.'” The White House later had to clarify that, “Senator Manchin did not characterize himself as having been ‘misleading.'”
In the same press conference, when asked the very reasonable question of “What took so long to ramp up testing?”, the president snapped: “it didn’t take long at all. What happened was the Omicron virus spread even more rapidly than anybody thought.” Well, that’s not true, either. As the Washington Post‘s Claire Parker pointed out, “experts had sounded the alarm for more than a year that such a variant could emerge, especially in the vast swaths of the world that remain largely unvaccinated, coming back to bite wealthy countries accused of hoarding doses. Some had repeatedly urged the U.S. government to accelerate the authorization and distribution of rapid tests, pointing to other wealthy nations that have done just that.” Indeed, the White House’s answer to such questions as recently as early December was mockery.
The president telling two whoppers at a pandemic press conference seems like the type of thing that might attract notice from those journalistic quarters specializing in the intersection between media, politics, and truth. And yet here was the next-day headline at CNN’s Reliable Sources: “Biden calls out anti-vax liars for promoting ‘dangerous misinformation.’ But don’t expect anything to change.”…
It is not acceptable for a president to claim, as he did Tuesday in a single tweet, that Build Back Better is “fully paid for” (it’s not), that it “will not increase the deficit” (it would), and that it “won’t raise the taxes by one penny for anyone making less than $400,000 a year” (counters the Tax Policy Center: “roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022“).
Some fact-checkers have occasionally taken issue with Biden’s false claims. The Washington Post fact-checker did take issue with 78 false or misleading claims made by Biden in his first three months in office (although it overlooked most of Biden’s false claims — even most obviously false Biden claims are not included in the Washington Post’s tally of false or misleading claims).
