Politifact, the “fact-checking” arm of the Poynter Institute, proudly claims to “stand up for the facts,” maintaining “our only agenda is to publish the truth.”
Daily Citizen puts the term fact-checking in quotes because we are dubious of the reliability of this term as it applies to organizations like Politifact and others. There is very good documentation for this mistrust. They are proven to be politically motivated along party lines.
You need not guess how those lines line up.
A glaring example of this is Politifact’s “2024 Lie of the Year” chosen by Politifact’s readers. They explain,
Rather, it is merely proof that partisan minds think alike. Their landslide choice for 2024’s political lie was President-elect Donald Trump’s claim that illegal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets.
That claim was indeed false. No credible evidence has documented it as fact. Police bodycam footage appears to show an Ohio woman who reportedly ate a cat. But further local reporting, here and here, documents she is a United States citizen.
But this was a mistruth spoken by one candidate and a few social media voices. It was refuted by hundreds of media outlets.
Yet, 54% of Politifact readers thought this was the biggest political lie of the year, as demonstrated in this graphic from the Politifact story.
Whopper of a Political Lie Missing
But the largest political lie of 2024 is curiously missing from Politifact’s reporting.
Of course, that is the historic cover-up from the countless members of the elite media and those close to President Joe Biden. It was the demonstrably false claim that the president was in tip-top shape physically and cognitively when the rest of the world regularly saw this was not the case. It was only after President Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 presidential debate with Donald Trump – which effectively ended his presidential run – that the extensive cover-up began to crumble.
There are many video montages of countless members of the media and the Democrat establishment confidently stating, on endless occasions, that Joe Biden was as good and sharp as he had ever been. Some boasted he was never better.
Here is one dramatic sampling:
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who is 50 years old, shamelessly told CNN that Biden was so strong and vibrant, “I can’t even keep up with him.” Alejandros Mayorkas, United States Secretary of Homeland Security, told NBC’s Meet the Press that “the most difficult part of a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing, detail oriented and focused.” He described his boss as “incredibly sharp, incredibly probing” demonstrating “incredible command of the details.”
Janet Yellen of the Federal Reserve told CBS News, “I’m often with him on foreign trips, he’s at the top of his game.” Nancy Pelosi regularly told MSNBC and other outlets, “He has vision, he has knowledge, he has judgement and strategic thinking.” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware confidently told ABC News, “There’s nothing to these challenges, these suggestions that somehow he’s not sharp and he’s not capable.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland explained to Congress on April 16, 2024, “I have complete confidence in the president. I have watched him expertly guide meetings of staff and cabinet members. I could not have more confidence in the president.”
Of course, Joe Scarborough famously damaged his own reputation as a serious journalist by claiming on Morning Joe last March that Joe Biden “is far beyond cogent” confidently adding, “In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically because he’s been around for 50 years.” Scarborough was not done. He went on to double down on his dramatic claims: “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second.”
Everyone seemed to be in on the cover-up.
Even New York Senator Chuck Schumer assured the nation in an official Senate press conference, “His mental acuity is great, it’s as good as it’s been over the years. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.”
But of course, it wasn’t right-wing propaganda.
We all saw it for ourselves, over, and over again. But major media like The Associated Press told us seeing was not believing. The New York Times tried to convince us what we saw was “misleading.” The White House told us videos of President Biden as confused and meandering were “cheap fakes.”
Mainstream voices like these kept up the charade month after long month … until they no longer could. Until it got too obvious to cover over after that infamous debate debacle.
But just this past weekend, CBS’s chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford confessed on her network’s Sunday morning show Face the Nation, that the most undercovered and underreported story of 2024 “would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate. Unquestioned.”
She added,
Crawford admits the media failed in their duty to tell the truth, and that this failure had real-world consequences in our nation’s highest election.
You can see that refreshingly honest admission here:
This was a national political scam of unmatched proportions. Full stop. And it was facilitated by major media outlets.
Yes, other presidents in the relatively recent past have had serious physical and mental difficulties that limited their ability to fully perform their tasks: FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan in his later years. But none of these benefited from such a widely orchestrated cover-up by so many in the media to convince the American people everything was fine, if not “better than ever.” That is precisely what we saw in this deliberate masking for President Biden. And it was all focused on influencing the outcome of a presidential election!
This is not just the largest and most serious political lie of 2024. It is one of the most widely and consistently covered-over deceptions of modern U.S. political history.
Thankfully, many Americans wisely saw through it. And some good journalists are now admitting the fact.
Image from Shutterstock.
The post Politifact Seriously Muffs Their ‘2024 Lie of the Year’: It was Clearly the Media’s Cover-Up appeared first on Daily Citizen.
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