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His outgroup does lie. Frequently and, sometimes, brazenly. That's politics, baby. It's not so reasonable to assume they are baseless smears to the extent that you're surprised by something closer to the truth given the facts in this case. Like the Hunter laptop story. That was a true story. It was even a believable story. But, it was also a timely political smear, which reasonable people are skeptical of. Folks should not take every claim in political attack ads at face value.
Outright shoving them into the Republican propaganda box isn't doing people like Scott any favors. I would not be surprised if Scott hadn't paid attention to or watched any Biden old clips-- certainly not selectively edited ones posted to pwn libs on X.com.
I believe it was Michael Moynihan of the Fifth Column that said, a couple years ago now, what sold him that Biden's age was a real problem was the distinct omission of it as a topic in media. That late night talk shows didn't make jokes about his boomer moments was evidence itself this was not a concern people were interested in even laughing about. Then again, I'm not sure we'll ever really see a late night talk show scene that sees hosts take D-politicians to task for jokes.
I keep hearing about these selectively edited Biden gaffes, but I keep seeing normal videos of Biden having senior moments.
Those are the same thing seen through different eyes, right? If I took a video every time my mother forgot the name of something or why she came into a room, I could absolutely make her look demented. If all you have is a set of videos curated by interest group A, and another set of videos curated by B, your final conclusion is going to have to rely on your pre-existing opinions or some other set of evidence (frequency of videos, or lack of unscripted public appearances). A lot of Ds should have known better, but I can see why people like Scott weren't convinced.
The videos went beyond forgetting a name.
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Of course his outgroup lies. But his in group lies a lot too. Including to him. Maybe he wants to revisit his position on the media.
His point with "the media rarely lies" wasn't that the media isn't deceptive. He was using an extremely narrow definition of lie - to deliberately tell a known falsehood as true. I do agree with him that the media rarely does that.
Yet here…they basically did. Not all lies are created equally. When the media directly lie, they seem to lie on the really weighty matters.
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I doubt this would violate Scott's position that the media rarely lies. For that to happen, you would need to show that:
1 is necessary for it to be a lie, but as we know, most news outlets wouldn't take a stand quite like that. They'd instead say something like "White House PR team indicates reports of cognitive decline are overstated". There's a few levels of indirection there, that make it hard for us to say that the media themselves were lying. They'd be reporting on what someone else says, and they also wouldn't be saying that he has no cognitive decline, but something far more defensible.
2 is necessary for us to say that the media lies more than rarely. But even if we find some examples where an outlet did something like 1, that wouldn't be enough to say that it's more than "rarely" lying.
It depends on who you classify as the media. See Joe Scarborough’s comments.
NYT also wasn’t very honest on it either.
What did NYT say? I really doubt they'd make factual claims that go beyond reporting what other people say.
What did Joe Scarborough say? Once again, individuals actors or outlets would not be enough to fully falsify Scott's claim. There would be to be many, and then it'd end up being a judgement call about how you define "rarely"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/us/politics/biden-age-videos.html
They described the clips as misleading. Now they are citing those same clips as evidence of Biden’s frailness.
Joe S said Biden is probably sharper than he has ever been.
Looking at that article, I don't think they make any strong factual claims that can be proven false. They say the clips are misleading and it of context and edited to remove crucial details. That's hard stuff to say "that's factually incorrect". The video clips were edited so some contextual info was lost. "Crucial", and what details are important to the context could vary person to person.
Are they now citing the same clips? If they are, that would be weasley, but I'm not sure if counts as proving they were "lying" before. I definitely think that nytimes and the media in general suck, and they have no scruples, and are probably bad for the world, but I do think that it's very hard to catch them in an outright lie.
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