Come On, Man! by Joe Concha

Author:Joe Concha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

13

Get This Man Elected

Complaining about the liberal media is one of the mainstays of pragmatic, commonsense punditry. With such a varied selection of imbeciles, lickspittles, and brownnosers to choose from, who could blame us? But for all the misleading stories that have been written about Joe Biden in the last few years, it’s worth asking a question. Are journalists trying to fool us? Or are they fooling themselves? One thing’s for sure: You’d have to be a fool not to see how skewed the news is now.

The bias is clear even to the least informed voter who hasn’t lost their common sense. Way back when, in 1992, I first noticed media bias. It was during a presidential debate, which I was surprisingly watching instead of a sporting event or being out somewhere on campus. To that point, in my college years, I was more of a SportsCenter than C-SPAN guy.

At twenty-one, I was like any other guy at school and wasn’t paying much attention to the political scene. Quite frankly, it was a bit tedious at the time. There was no Donald Trump, unless reading the New York Post’s gossip page (“Page Six”) was your thing. And there wasn’t the unintentional comedy that is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to make us laugh and cringe simultaneously. Most of all, there was no Fox News or MSNBC, just a responsible, sane version of CNN.

But H. Ross Perot and Bill Clinton had made things interesting that election year and I suddenly found myself immersed in what looked to be a close race after three straight blowouts by Republicans Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H. W. Bush (once). The latter was seeking a second term, which would make it sixteen straight years of Republican rule in the Oval Office.

But a recession had hit and the sky-high approval ratings for Bush from the Gulf War had quickly evaporated. Now the incumbent was in serious trouble as he entered the second general election debate, moderated by Carole Simpson of ABC News.

Being a political media novice, I had zero idea who Carole Simpson even was. But like most Americans, I assumed that any journalist chosen to moderate a debate watched by 70 million people would be on the same objective level as CNN’s Bernard Shaw or ABC’s Peter Jennings, two respected anchors at the time.

I was wrong. The bias was subtle, but I specifically remember throwing an empty Bud Dry can at my twenty-five-inch TV, which weighed more than I did (and therefore could take the punishment), after Simpson showed which team she supported. No, I wasn’t dismayed because I was some kind of Bush superfan, by the way. It just suddenly felt like he had three opponents on that stage: Clinton, Perot, and the debate moderator herself.

The moment came about halfway through the debate, when Bush was asked a question from an audience member in a town hall setting, which is customary for the second of three presidential debates.

The question was just a bit hyperbolic.

The man in the audience said, “We’ve talked a lot tonight about creating jobs.

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