{"id":36157,"date":"2024-09-14T13:14:51","date_gmt":"2024-09-14T20:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=36157"},"modified":"2024-09-14T13:14:52","modified_gmt":"2024-09-14T20:14:52","slug":"why-the-medias-sanewashing-of-trump-is-uniquely-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/09\/14\/why-the-medias-sanewashing-of-trump-is-uniquely-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"WHY THE MEDIA’S ‘SANEWASHING’ OF TRUMP IS UNIQUELY DANGEROUS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

FRI, 9\/13\/2024 – BY\u00a0CARL GIBSON<\/a> (Occupy.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Former President Donald Trump is growing increasingly deranged, yet the media is asleep at the wheel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In just the span of just two weeks, Trump called for<\/a> the jailing of political opponents, blamed<\/a> Vice President Kamala Harris for the security lapse that led to his would-be assassin getting past Secret Service, amplified vulgar content<\/a> implying his female opponent performed a sex act, called for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal and gave a nod<\/a> to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and even had a public dispute<\/a> with Arlington National Cemetery over a photo-op he did over the tombstones of dead soldiers. The 78 year-old ex-president may even be experiencing a form of dementia, though so far major media outlets have yet to seriously explore that possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previously, a major party nominee doing just one of the things in the aforementioned paragraph would merit wall-to-wall coverage and blaring headlines in the national newspapers of record. But there has been remarkably scant coverage beyond individual one-off write-ups of these incidents that are almost immediately forgotten in the din of the 24-hour news cycle. Meanwhile, these same outlets tend to overanalyze comparatively dull flubs by Democrats \u2014 like inferring<\/a> that Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and his wife Gwen calling intrauterine insemination \u201cIVF\u201d was somehow dishonest \u2014 in an effort to appear objective. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Major media outlets are failing to do their basic duty of properly informing millions of Americans who are about to vote in what may prove to be the most consequential election in modern history. And the results of the beltway media\u2019s catastrophic incompetence could reverberate for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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WHERE IS THE \u2018TRUMP IS TOO OLD\u2019 NARRATIVE?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When 81 year-old President Joe Biden was still in the 2024 race, there was no shortage of breathless coverage from major newspapers about his latest gaffes. And as his June debate with Trump showed in painful detail, Biden was indeed not displaying the mental fortitude voters expect from the leader of the world\u2019s largest economy and military (Trump, for his part, also failed to sway voters to his side, with post-debate polls showing he failed to move the needle in a positive direction<\/a> for his own campaign).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, when faced with two candidates who were only three years apart in age, the media all but ignored Trump\u2019s declining mental faculties and honed in on Biden\u2019s age with laser-like focus. The New Republic\u2019s Greg Sargent illustrated this point by posting numerous headlines from major media outlets about Biden\u2019s age, but switching out his name for Trump\u2019s<\/a>. Sargent proposed that these same outlets simply have the same level of scrutiny for Trump as they did for Biden. Some examples include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n