Here’s a story older than Joe Biden.
it is PolitiFact “Fact Check” Brit Hume’s book from four years ago. In retrospect, it’s a perfect example of how the media gaslights its readers while pretending to claim truth.
I worked with Brit Hume at Fox News for nearly 35 years, and in hundreds of staff meetings and countless hours of air time, I noticed that Mr. Hume has a rare, almost annoying, quality: He is almost always right. He chooses his words carefully and with precision.
“Older people who have memory problems or other issues that come with aging can have temporary symptoms, or symptoms that last for hours at a time, and be perfectly fine,” Britt said ahead of the first 2020 debate between Donald Trump and Biden, adding, “I don’t think there’s any question that Biden has dementia, but that’s not going to be evident tonight.”
Britt was once again completely right: Biden does have dementia, but that wasn’t evident during his fiery, disruptive debate with Trump.
But rightly or not, Hume was guilty of calling the man who must defeat Trump “senile,” which didn’t sit well with a press corps dedicated to Biden’s victory.
PolitiFact could have easily found experts who noticed a fact that was painfully obvious to casual observers four years ago: Joe Biden is in mental decline.
Enter PolitiFact, a fact-checking site widely accepted by the traditional media as an arbiter of truth. Pointer InstituteA nonprofit journalism training and research group. Their motto? “Democracy needs journalism. Journalism needs pointers.”
Pointer is not just a bunch of high-minded liberals, but a multimillion-dollar organization funded by donors including Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
PolitiFact is a “trusted” Washington outlet that some would call part of the swamp, but it’s not like that at all. Its articles are not necessarily extremely biased, but the following is not surprisingly biased. That being said, here’s how it distorts reality:
Twist what someone said and expose the twisted version
Britt used the word “senility,” a common term for an older person who shows signs of intellectual decline. It’s not a medical diagnosis, it’s an everyday word. Webster’s defines it as “relating to, showing, or characteristic of old age; showing the decline in cognitive abilities (such as memory) that accompanies old age.” That was a perfect description of Joe Biden four years ago.
PolitiFact acknowledged this, saying, “Generally, the word gerontology is defined as relating to old age, and some people often use it in connection with memory loss or illness,” then added a clever twist: “gerontology is not an exact medical term, but is often used in place of ‘dementia,’ which is the more accurate and accepted medical term.”
Now that the word “senility” had magically transformed into “dementia” in Britt’s mouth, the article went on to reveal things he never said.
Find experts who agree
Honest journalists should do their best to consult experts and provide readers with insight into the experts’ positions. Dishonest journalists, like Miriam Valverde of PolitiFact, use experts to make their opinion columns look like honest, fact-checked articles. But to be clear, her mission was not actually to check the facts, but to “prove” Britto wrong.
She found two geriatrics experts to bolster her case, including Donald Jurivich, a man whose title is so impressive it spans 22 words, the Eva Gilbertson Professor Emeritus of Geriatrics and Chief of the Department of Geriatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Both experts categorically stated that Biden does not have dementia.
Valverde also said that Biden’s doctor said, “Vice President Biden is a healthy, energetic 77-year-old man who can perform the duties of the presidency well.” It took four years for the White House to reveal that Biden had never taken a cognitive test. It’s important to remember that you can’t fail a test you haven’t taken.
Of course, if she or PolitiFact had even a shred of objectivity, they could have easily found experts who noticed what was painfully obvious to casual observers four years ago: Joe Biden was in mental decline. No, all the experts agreed that up was down.
One professor even defended Biden, saying that he sometimes pauses to “compensate for his stutter.” Is this even OK? I’ve been watching and listening to Joe Biden since the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and have never heard him stutter. If he stuttered in his younger years, that’s at least 33 years away. Of course, the “experts” knew this too. They were just playing a role in hiding Biden’s cognitive decline.
Call him racist, sexy, ageist!
If you’re pretending to be an honest reporter, you can’t just call people “ageist” — instead, like a ventriloquist with a particularly critical dummy, you find someone else to do it for you.
Valverde quoted a long-titled professor who said Britto’s comments were “a shameful display of ageism and ignorance.” Then, in case you missed it the first time, she quoted the professor a second time, reminding us that “the use of the word ‘old’ is a pejorative and reflects unmitigated ageism.”
It’s a pretty bold claim, especially since Britt is the same age as Biden and candidly admits, “I have traces of it myself, and I know what it feels like.” Fortunately for Britt, Joe Biden is a white man, so the pundits had no choice but to call him a shamefully ageist.
I rate the PolitiFact article “Mostly Propaganda.”
But this isn’t just a history lesson: they’re still around today, and continuing their same shenanigans.
Recent Examples“Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina on July 24, 2024, said that Vice President Kamala Harris ‘supports free taxpayer-funded government health care for illegal immigrants.'” PolitiFact’s rating? “Mostly False.”
PolitiFact? Her full-throated defense (Here’s a great videoShe promised to provide free health care to everyone living in the United States (including illegal immigrants), but she did not specifically use the word “free.”
The gaslighting continues.
Editor’s note: This article was first Ken LaCorte’s Substack.
