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Does Time magazine really matter anymore?
It still has a circulation of more than 1 million, but that is one-third of what it was in 2012. Does anything it reports still resonate, or is it like a tree that collapses unheard in the solitude of the woods?
Time just secured an interview with President Joe Biden, when Biden has granted very few interviews to print news outlets. Time gained access to Donald Trump in April, and the first thing you notice when you compare the two interviews is the length.
At the top of the transcripts, Time claims the Biden transcript is a “28 minute read,” while Trump’s is listed as 83 minutes. Time’s “fact check” of the Trump interviews (“21 minute read”) is almost as long as the Biden interview.
Another noticeable tilt is the agenda of questions. Biden’s questions were overwhelmingly about foreign policy. There are three on inflation, three on immigration, and three on Biden’s age. There were zero questions on Hunter Biden and the Biden scandals. There were zero questions on the Trump trial or the Trump prosecutions.
Did Team Biden put any conditions on which questions could be asked? It’s a fair question, considering how selective they’ve been in handing out interviews.
By contrast, by my count, Time asked Trump 11 questions about the Trump prosecutions (and “revenge” for them), five questions about Jan. 6, two about potential political violence in 2025, four on fighting the “Deep State,” three on his “dictator for a day” joke, and four on whether he’d seek to overturn the 22nd Amendment and seek a third term.
On top of that, Trump drew 14 questions on abortion policy and six on crime. It’s obvious from the Time transcripts that they consider Trump’s opinions on domestic issues to be much more controversial—and even extremist—than anything Biden advocates.
The rest of the media picked up on Trump’s abortion answers, and Biden didn’t have to provide any abortion answers.
Even the age questions to Biden were timid softballs, and Biden’s answer—suggesting he could take his interviewer Massimo Calabresi in a fight—was taken as a joke. Calabresi told CNN’s Jake Tapper it was “lighthearted” and “quite funny.” Biden responded to a follow-up about voter concerns with his usual spin: “Watch me.” Calabresi confessed it might be a “stock answer.” So, why not push through it? Why not ask, “Everyone’s been watching you, that’s your problem”?
Time could have asked Biden why his team refuses to release audio of his interview with stolen-documents special counsel Robert Hur, with the fear Republicans will exploit the audio in advertising. But Time pretends Hur is a nobody and that Biden’s stolen documents should already be forgotten. Hur refused to prosecute Biden, and Jack Smith just keeps prosecuting Trump.
It looks a bit rigged.
By contrast, Trump’s interviewer Eric Cortellessa lectured him: “I just want to say for the record, there’s no evidence that President Biden directed this prosecution against you.” Trump rejected that: “I always hate the way a reporter will make those statements. They know it’s so wrong.” Time, like other slavishly pro-Biden outlets, refuses to acknowledge that Biden’s No. 3 Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo resigning to join Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team of Trump prosecutors shreds the “no evidence” lie.
The Democrats running Time are hyperbolically raising fear that a president using the Justice Department might go after his political opponents, while somehow being blind and deaf enough to ignore that Biden is using the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. They can’t believe anyone would object to their shamelessness.
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When the elected Democrat district attorney of Manhattan and his 12 (likely Democrat) Manhattan jurors convicted Donald Trump on artificially inflated felony counts of business accounting, you could count on leftist journalists to try to make it the Most Historic Event Ever.
We’re not even sure it won’t all be reversed on appeal. But “historic” is their word of choice … when they like the result.
In 1999, when Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about sex with an intern named Monica Lewinsky, Geraldo Rivera was furious on the “Today” show: “It was a spiteful action, an action that they performed absolutely in violation of the framers’ intent. It was a legislative coup d’etat.”
Impeaching Trump twice was never a “coup” to NBC News. But the worst part of that spectacle was leftist activists like Rivera trying to speak for the framers of the Constitution. He was implying it wasn’t just a revolting result but revolting in the eyes of James Madison and the rest. The Left reveres nothing about the Founders, routinely denouncing them as a racist, sexist, capitalist patriarchy.
This regrettable citation of the Founding Fathers happened again with the Trump trial, and again in this case, the American revolutionaries were placed on the side of the Democrats.
George Stephanopoulos began his commentary on “This Week” with the second president: “In 1774, John Adams said representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty. Two hundred and fifty years later, the heart and lungs of liberty are facing what may be the ultimate stress test.” It’s John Adams vs. Trump.
The front page of the June 3 New York Times was topped with an editorial—labeled “News Analysis”—from its White House correspondent Peter Baker. He picked Patrick Henry as the Trump opponent.
“The revolutionary hero Patrick Henry knew this day would come,” Baker began. Henry “feared that eventually a criminal might occupy the presidency and use his powers to thwart anyone who sought to hold him accountable.” In Henry’s words, “Away with your president, we will have a king.”
Never mind that historians pointed out Henry was inveighing against the Constitution before it was ratified. Baker channeled the Democrat line: “The notion that 34 felonies is not automatically disqualifying and a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate for commander in chief upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy.”
Inside the paper, the headline over Baker’s essay was “If a Felon Becomes President, Can Anyone Limit His Power?” The text box underlined the theme again: “Revival of a long-ago fear that a U.S. leader could try to be a king.” All that followed was the argument ad infinitum that Trump’s second term would result in “unfettered abuses of authority.”
What Baker and Stephanopoulos refused to understand was that this rhetoric of a president abusing authority can also be applied to President Joe Biden. On CNN, Scott Jennings mocked Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., on how Biden ruthlessly ignored the courts and the Congress in offering $165 billion in student loan “forgiveness” to win younger voters.
“You’re a member of Congress,” Jennings told Auchincloss. “Does it not offend you that the president of the United States is usurping your authority?” The eventual answer was no.
The Democrats and their media enablers use “history” to establish how there is a “right side,” and that is their leftist agenda. Undercutting democratic norms and coequal branches of government is admirable when the ends justify the means. The Founding Fathers are just yellowed paper puppets in their relentless power games.
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President Joe Biden made a well-publicized commencement address on May 19 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black college. The networks touted the speech but didn’t put any “fact-checkers” on it. It contained at least four fibs.
In an echo of his 1987 lies that crumbled in his first presidential campaign, Biden claimed, “I was the first Biden to ever graduate from college.” A newspaper obituary for his maternal grandfather Ambrose Finnegan noted he graduated college.
He repeated his story that his son Beau died of a brain tumor after he spent “a year in Iraq as a major—he won the Bronze Star—living next to a burn pit.” In 2019, FactCheck.org noted the science on cancer from exposure to burn pits in Iraq was “insufficient,” but Biden tells that story often.
Then Biden uncorked his typical race-baiting: “Today in Georgia, they won’t allow water to be available to you while you wait in line to vote in an election.” Georgia’s Legislature passed a bill in 2021 that said no person should “give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” within 150 feet of a polling place. It doesn’t mean you can’t have water!
Biden also claimed, “there’s a national effort to ban books—not to write history, but to erase history. They don’t see you in the future of America.” The leftists all said that “erasing history” bunk about Florida’s education standards, when it was crystal clear that black history was mandated, not erased.
None of these fact-check moments made the front-page New York Times story gushing over the Morehouse speech. It mentioned Biden spoke of deaths in his family and left out the “burn pits” part.
Biden’s recent lie that inflation was at 9% when he became president was so blatant that most of the liberal “fact-checkers” called it out: AP, CNN, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes, and The Washington Post. (Lead Stories and Reuters did not.) We’ll see if these latest Biden falsehoods get checked (again).
They could also check Biden’s four whoppers in remarks the day before at a campaign fundraiser in Atlanta.
The president told his backers, “I wasn’t going to run again after my son died because of being in Iraq for a year in those burn pits.” He said, “We were supposed to lose in 2020.” He claimed Donald Trump told Time magazine, “States should monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate the abortion bans.” Trump did not say that. Biden also claimed Trump said there were “really good people on both sides” in Charlottesville protests, implying he praised neo-Nazis. That’s an ongoing hoax.
At a Sunday afternoon campaign event in Detroit, the president again dragged out the line, “I’m the first in my family ever to go to college.”
A Sunday night speech at the NAACP brought more of the tired-brain gaffes. Biden claimed he was vice president “during the pandemic.” He said Obamacare was “saving millions of families $800,000—$8,000 a year in premiums.” The White House transcript adjusted it down to $800.
Then he returned to “folks wanting to ban books” and “erase black history, literally.”
He misquoted Trump as saying, “I’ll be a dictator on Day One” and “just inject bleach” to cure COVID-19. He bungled in claiming Trump said if he lost, there will be “bloodshed.” Trump implied an economic “bloodbath.”
The more Biden mangles the facts, the more you can be sure that national TV coverage is going to edit out the embarrassing parts. Call it “erasing history as it unfolds.”
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On Wednesday, President Joe Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not like Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record—and Donald Trump’s.
CNN reporter Erin Burnett began with how Trump’s promises of new jobs in Wisconsin didn’t come true: “Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?” Biden bragged: “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs, and I have never failed. I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president.” He did it all by himself! He claimed that other than Herbert Hoover, Trump’s “the only other president who lost more jobs than created in his four-year term.”
There’s a massive asterisk; namely, the global COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 156.6 million. The unemployment rate hit record lows across demographics—for women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and youth.
Obviously, the severe lockdowns during the pandemic—most aggressively pushed by the Democrats and their media allies—drove massive job losses. Nonfarm payroll employment in the United States declined by 9.4 million in 2020. So, Democrats blame that on Trump, and when the pandemic was over, they took credit for the economy climbing out of that hole.
But that wasn’t Biden’s worst mangle. He claimed to CNN that “no president’s had the run we have had, in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.”
That’s ridiculous! It’s a baldfaced lie. Inflation was 1.4%, again, due to the pandemic. Burnett didn’t check his facts, during or after the interview. She pushed him to acknowledge inflation was bad, but she didn’t suggest he was lying.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha tweeted: “And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward.”
And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward… https://t.co/1lgapFWYgp
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 9, 2024
That would be Daniel Dale, who’s almost entirely deployed on TV to “fact-check” Trump. Since Trump’s Manhattan trial began in mid-April, Dale has appeared nine times to “check” him. He has not appeared to check anyone else. On April 18, Jake Tapper said, “He’s handy to have around at times like this.”
Some of these fact checks are “brag checks.” Trump will say he’s ahead in all the polls, when he’s ahead in most polls. But Dale sounds most exasperated when Trump blames Biden for his legal troubles. On April 18, Dale decried “his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected district attorney.”
Dale can’t even disclose that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. He acknowledged Trump’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, was a Biden Justice Department official, and then joined Bragg’s team. A “conspiracy theory” between Democrat lawyers looks obvious here and declaring it “false” is a lame spin.
On Tuesday, Dale threw a penalty flag at Trump for saying Bragg is a “Soros-backed” prosecutor—and Trump didn’t say that in the remarks they’d just aired. Dale turned on the spin machine by saying leftist billionaire George Soros is “a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories” and then claimed “at best” the money was indirect: Soros donated to the Color of Change PAC, and then the PAC backed Bragg.
If a conservative DA received big money from a pro-Trump PAC, CNN would call him or her “Trump-backed” without hesitation. CNN deploys Dale not as a “fact-checker” as much as a spin spoiler.
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The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
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