US media have succumbed to a sycophantic Biden-Harris love-in

Millions now living will never die! The old apocalyptic slogan of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1920s is now the mantra of the American mainstream media, caught up in the rapture of liberal power reborn and the sheer delirium of Donald Trump’s impending replacement by Kamala Harris – oh, and Joe Biden gets to live in the White House too, in case you didn’t realise.

For those with weak stomachs, there is a bad time coming, as bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-alive syndrome provokes the American and wider media to ever more extravagant emotional spasms of cringe-making adulation of all things pertaining to the Bidens (except, of course, Hunter Biden). Remember the media’s Obama love-in and be very afraid: sheer relief will generate even worse drooling sycophancy this time around.

Not that we in Britain can strike a patronising attitude, if we recall the moronic hysteria in 1997 when the People’s Premier, Tony Blair entered Number 10.

It will be worse in America, where emotional incontinence is more embedded in the national DNA. Soon we shall long for the US commentariat as we have known it over the past four years: vituperative, hostile, sullen, viperish, toxic and heroically misrepresentative of reality in its obsessive hatred of Donald Trump – all of which was infinitely preferable to the sugar rush of drivelling Biden worship we can expect over the next four years.

Stop banging on about Beijing – don’t you realise something truly seismic is happening? A dog, Joe Biden’s dog, is returning to the White House: the reinstatement of the First Quadruped epitomises the feel-good factor that the media are vainly trying to inject into an unrelenting war situation they refuse to acknowledge. They are like feeble comedians attempting to raise a smile, oblivious to the stony faces of their audience.

Following the presidential election on American mainstream media was, to fumble for a neutral term – which they would never dream of doing – educational. The bias, or rather the extreme partisanship, was casual, unconscious, shameless and universal. It became clear that America was suffering from a lethal disease from which it needed immediate relief – and Covid-19 was a challenge too, if secondary to Trump.

When the controversy over voting irregularities began to dominate reporting, staff reporters announced that the President was “falsely accusing” his opponents of electoral malpractice. That breaches every convention of neutral reporting. A news reporter should simply relay the fact that such charges are being levelled; it would even be within the rules, considering the scale of the accusations, to say the President is “sensationally accusing” or even “controversially accusing”, but to say he is “falsely accusing” is to make a subjective judgement that should be left to Democratic spokesmen – but, then again, that is what most American television reporters are these days.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is not an assertion that voting fraud took place, any more than it is a claim that it did not. When one has no concrete information on a particular subject, no judgement should be made. It is the departure from that long-standing principle of neutrality and fact-based reportage that has turned the American media into a travesty. Their knee-jerk reaction to claims of fraud was to deny them – the opposite of what a professional news organisation equipped with investigative reporters is supposed to do.

The professional response would have been: “These are extremely grave charges, we don’t know whether they are true, but we shall carry out an exhaustive investigation and report back.” The substitute for that process last week was: “To prove Donald Trump is a liar, we have spoken to a couple of guys who would find themselves in the slammer if the charges were true and they have told us they are not. End of.”

The fact is that much of the US media wanted Trump defeated, had propagandised tirelessly to that end for four years and, come the election, had one settled yardstick: anything that contributed to a Biden victory was true, anything that helped Trump was false. That is the postmodern replacement for objective truth.

Remember the terrier-like media hounding of Trump in 2016, when rioters took to the streets and senior Democratic legislators made fools of themselves with claims that “Russia” had won the election for him? In pursuit of that fantasy, prosecutors issued 2,800 subpoenas and conducted 500 witness interviews, the President was investigated for 675 days by special counsel Robert Mueller and a team of 19 lawyers, all of which concluded there was no evidence of any Trump-related person collaborating with Russians.

Despite that refutation, the Democrats then proceeded to impeach the President. They turned the solemn, extremely rare process of presidential impeachment into a farce, to satisfy their rancour. And these are the same people who are now tut-tutting sanctimoniously and urging Trump to go gentle into that good night. From any objective standpoint, compared to the standard of proof embraced by the Democrats in the Russian charade, the Trump campaign’s complaints of voter fraud merit serious investigation.

Consider, first, the infrastructure. The Democrats’ H.R.1 measures introduced into the House in March embodied extension of mail-in voting, same-day voter registration and a whole raft of electoral changes that Republicans view as facilitating fraud. In the states where the outcome is controverted, there is no factual dispute that officials unilaterally implemented practices that were prohibited by law, using the pandemic as the catch-all pretext.

In Wisconsin, for example, the Election Commission, acting ultra vires, allowed local county election clerks to “cure” spoiled ballots, invalidated under state law, exempted almost 200,000 voters from ID rules and failed to purge some 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls, as required by law. Against such a background, a certain paranoia among Republicans is understandable.

Again, without prejudging, the accumulation of evidence that GOP poll watchers were hugely obstructed in Pennsylvania is becoming difficult to ignore. In fact, a judge intervened to order they be given access, though this was still resisted by officials. Why? Covid precautions, that was the excuse. But why should poll watchers and poll challengers be kept thirty yards away from ballot papers, which they must be able to see to perform their function, while counting staff more freely interact?

And if they wanted to avoid accusations of fraud, why did election officials blank out a counting centre window with cardboard, caught on video? Is cardboard blackout a recognised anti-coronavirus precaution? There is, as they say, “stuff” building up and it can only be settled by the courts. Perhaps it has some foundation, perhaps it is all hokum. We must wait and see.

But the US media will not wait and see. After scornfully dismissing all fraud claims with minimal investigation, they went on to proclaim Joe Biden president. Since when was that their constitutional remit? And since when did social media giants have the right to censor material germane to the principal operation of American democracy, the election of a president? Twitter censored the President of the United States six times within 48 hours last week. To echo Senator Ted Cruz, when Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, recently appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Who the hell elected you?”

This may be the beginning of the end for Big Tech liberal tyranny. Twitter and Facebook are increasingly being deserted. The skids are under the television networks too: they are a diminishing force. So are the pollsters: a poll showing a 17 per cent Biden lead on polling day looks more like manipulation of voter morale than honest forecasting.

The American media are in trouble. Even if Biden enters the Oval Office, he does so in the most unfavourable circumstances possible. The Senate is likely to remain GOP controlled, the Democrat majority in the House has been cut and the AOC looney tunes tendency reinforced there. There has been no Blue Wave. Trump gained five million more votes than in 2016; Trumpism is a monolith, completely dominating the Republican movement, and now aggrieved and energised, while power is likely to split the fragile Democrat coalition.

Whether Donald or Ivanka, “I’ll be back” is the message from the right and there is nothing the discredited, politically monocultural media will be able to do to stop it. Their lack of curiosity regarding major stories testifies to their degeneration from greedy newshounds to propagandist lapdogs.