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Years Of Media Misdirection Over Biden Mental State Are Unraveling Before Our Eyes

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8 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By JASON COHEN

Corporate media’s years-long effort to sweep questions about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness under the rug took a devastating blow after his debate with former President Donald Trump.

Voters have long been concerned about Biden’s mental fitness being insufficient to be president, and Republicans have repeatedly raised doubts about his cognitive competence, including during the 2020 campaign as he made numerous gaffes. Despite concerns from Americans, legacy media outlets have consistently downplayed their legitimacy and criticized those who voiced them, even suggesting the narrative of incompetence stems from Russia.

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CNN published an analysis in August 2021, concluding that concerns about Biden’s cognitive capabilities were mostly a “moot” issue. The analysis suggested it was primarily Republicans who were pushing the narrative that Biden is diminished.

“This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life,” the analysis by former CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza stated. “If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.”

The NYT published an opinion piece in November 2020 titled “Stop Worrying About Biden’s Age. We Need His Wisdom Right Now” that stated, “I can’t be bothered with the despicable Sleepy-Joe canard that the right is peddling, except to say that if this is what dementia looks like, I don’t know what to call my own flashes of forgetfulness, in which words, keys and hair scrunchies regularly desert me.”

Moreover, The Hill published a piece in November 2019 suggesting Biden’s frequent gaffes are due to a stutter he has had since he was a child rather than cognitive decline.

“Some have been quick to question Biden’s mental fitness, hinting at a possible age-related cognitive decline (he just turned 77 years old), but it’s important to consider that many of those missteps could have been caused by his lifelong struggle with a speech impediment,” The Hill stated.

Special counsel Robert Hur published a report in February finding Biden mismanaged classified documents, but he opted not to seek charges against the president because of the improbability of obtaining a conviction based on the likelihood a jury may perceive the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Corporate media defended Biden’s lucidity and attacked Hur as partisan and deceptive after a transcript of their interview was published, revealing memory lapses, such as appearing to forget when he began and ended his vice presidency and the date of his late son Beau’s death.

For instance, the NYT reported that “Biden appeared clearheaded most of the time” and that he “went into great detail about many matters,” while The Washington Post noted that “Biden doesn’t come across as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”

NBC News acknowledged Biden’s “memory lapses” during the interview, but highlighted the “detailed exchanges” that took place in its headline.

Several clips about Biden in June amassed attention for underscoring the 81-year-old’s diminished fitness and increased gaffes, including the president freezing and wandering off. The White House, in the month leading up to the debate, characterized concerning videos of Biden as “cheap fakes,” and the media picked up on the narrative.

“‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead,” a headline by The Washington Post on June 14 read.

“The use of these clips is an especially pernicious couple of examples of manipulated video… because it’s intended to create a false narrative that doesn’t reflect the event as it occurred,” the outlet asserted, stating that the style of editing made them misleading. The NYT published an article titled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts” on June 21, similarly claiming the cropping of the videos makes them deceptive.

The latest panic about Biden’s age and fitness has led to the president facing growing high-profile calls to drop out of the race, such as from a prominent columnist and a Democratic representative. Five significant media publications, including the NYT, called for Biden to withdraw, and two urged him to at least consider it, The Hill reported on Sunday.

“There’s ample speculation online about what the news media did and didn’t do with respect to covering the president’s age,” NYT executive editor Joe Kahn said in a note to NYT journalists on Wednesday that the outlet shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steadfast, fact-based reporting on the subject that began a couple of years ago as we documented Biden’s age-related challenges in multiple, industry-leading articles. We have stayed on that story at every turn, always with nuance and context, through today’s outstanding report.”

The coverage of Biden’s competence should have been more intense, some reporters who cover the White House told CNN anonymously on Tuesday. One reporter told the outlet they erred by not probing more after Hur’s report.

“The right-wing media was calling him senile from day one, and that wasn’t true,” the reporter told CNN. “Then whenever you report on the age you were in some ways solidifying, giving credence to some people that were actually of bad faith.”

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said in March that the current “version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever. Not a close second and I’ve known him for years… If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”

Scarborough asked on Friday, after the debate, if Biden should withdraw from the race, raising concerns about his capability to run the country and beat Trump.

The Washington Post, NBC and The Hill did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

International

RFK Jr. tells Tucker how Big Pharma uses ‘perverse incentives’ to get vaccines approved

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From LifeSiteNews

By Matt Lamb

Kennedy defended his decision to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which he decried as a tool used to “rubber stamp” vaccines.

The vaccine approval process is a “bundle of perverse incentives” since pharmaceutical companies stand to make billions of dollars in revenue from it, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Tucker Carlson recently.

Kennedy appeared on Carlson’s show yesterday to discuss a variety of issues, including the potential link between autism and vaccines and his overhauling of the vaccine advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month.

Kennedy began by explaining that Big Pharma has been targeting academic journals to ensure its products receive favorable reviews.

“The journals won’t publish anything critical of vaccines … there’s so much pressure on them. They’re funded by pharmaceutical companies, and they’ll lose advertising and revenue from reprints,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy then noted that Big Pharma will “pay to get something published in these journals,” before accusing industry leaders of pushing drugs on doctors and of hiring “mercenary scientists” to manipulate data until their product is deemed safe and effective.

The entire complex is broken due to the “perverse incentives,” he lamented.

Later in the interview, Kennedy defended his decision to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June, which he decried as a mere tool to “rubber stamp” vaccines.

This sort of “agency capture” explains the lucrative nature of vaccines, he added.

Kennedy then summarized the “perverse” process as follows:

First of all, the federal government often times actually designs the vaccine, [the National Institutes of Health] would design it, would hand it over to the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company then runs it … first through [the] FDA, then through [the] ACIP, and gets it recommended.

If you can get that recommendation you now got a billion dollars in — at least — revenues by the end of the year, every year, forever. So, there was a gold rush to add new vaccines to the schedule and ACIP never turned away a single vaccine … that came to them they recommended, and a lot of these vaccines are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.

Kennedy further pointed to the Hepatitis B shot for newborns as an example of how the industry has been corrupted.

In 1999, the CDC “looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within the first 30 days of life and compared those children to children who had received the vaccine later — or not at all. And they found an 1,135% elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children. It shocked them. They kept the study secret and manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link,” he said.

“We want to protect public health,” Kennedy explained, but “these vaccines … can cause chronic disease, chronic injuries that last a lifetime.”

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Global media alliance colluded with foreign nations to crush free speech in America: House report

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Dan Frieth

The now-defunct ad coalition GARM shared insider data and urged boycotts of Twitter to punish non-compliance with its ‘harmful content’ standards, a US House Judiciary report shows.

A new report from the U.S. House Judiciary Committee has shed light on what it describes as an alarming collaboration between powerful corporations and foreign governments aimed at suppressing lawful American speech.

The investigation focuses on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an initiative founded in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which the committee accuses of acting as a censorship cartel.

According to the report, GARM, whose members control about 90 percent of global advertising spending, exploited its market dominance to pressure platforms like Twitter (now X) into compliance with its restrictive content policies.

A copy of the report can be found HERE.

The committee highlighted how GARM sought to “effectively reduce the availability and monetization” of content it deemed harmful, regardless of public demand for free expression.

Documents obtained by the committee reveal direct coordination between GARM and foreign regulators, including the European Commission and Australia’s eSafety commissioner.

In one exchange, a European bureaucrat encouraged advertisers to leverage their influence to “push Twitter to deliver on GARM asks.”

Similarly, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant praised GARM’s “significant collective power in helping to hold the platforms to account” and sought updates to “take into account in our engagement and regulatory decisions.”

Partial email from Julie Inman Grant to Rob Rakowitz dated November 9, 2022, expressing interest in GARM's collective power to hold platforms accountable and emphasizing the importance of brand and platform safety, with email addresses partially redacted.

Robert Rakowitz, GARM’s co-founder and initiative lead, expressed a chilling goal in private correspondence, stating that silencing President Donald Trump was his “main thing” and likening the president’s speech to a “contagion” he aimed to contain “to protect infection overall.”

Email from Rob Rakowitz dated Tuesday, November 1, 2022, discussing plans approved by the Steer Team to influence Twitter and Elon Musk regarding advertising standards, mentioning collaboration with WPP and outlining transparency and remediation plans for advertisers; includes blacked-out and redacted email addresses and ends with his title as Initiative Lead at the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and mentions WFA locations in Brussels, London, New York, and Singapore.

The report outlines how GARM distributed previously unavailable non-public information about Twitter’s adherence to its standards, fully aware this would prompt advertisers to boycott the platform if it failed to conform. According to the House report, Rakowitz admitted that this information sharing was designed to encourage members not to advertise on Twitter.

He went as far as to draft statements urging GARM members to halt advertising on the platform, telling colleagues he had gone “as close as possible” to saying Twitter “is unsafe, cease and desist.”

Despite the widespread impact of GARM’s actions, including what the committee describes as coerced “concessions” from platforms, internal polling circulated within GARM showed that “66 percent of American consumers valued free expression over protection from harmful content.”

Still, GARM pressed ahead with efforts to “eliminate all categories of harmful content in the fastest possible timing,” ignoring consumer preferences.

Even after GARM dissolved in 2024 amid legal challenges, similar efforts persisted.

A new coalition led by Dentsu and The 614 Group briefly attempted to revive GARM’s mission before disbanding under scrutiny. Gerry D’Angelo, a former GARM leader, reflected on the initiative’s overreach, stating, “Did we go too far in those first rounds of exclusionary restrictions? I would say yes.”

The Judiciary Committee warns that despite GARM’s downfall, the threat of collusion to stifle free expression remains.

It pledged to continue oversight to defend “the fundamental principles” of the Constitution and ensure that markets, not coordinated censorship efforts, shape the flow of information in the digital age.

Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.

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