Leighton Woodhouse
Tablet, Oct. 31, 2022
“Most of us know better than to expect the media establishment to pause for even a fleeting moment of introspection but, still, it’s incredible to see how many pundits and blue-check experts chose to double down on the “ableist” defense.”
On the debate stage last week, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman performed like one might expect from someone who survived a stroke only five months ago. In the aftermath of the debate, Democratic strategists have been asking—anonymously, of course—how anybody thought it was a good idea to foist Fetterman onto such a public stage. The simplest answer is that they thought they could get away with it because they believed their own hype.
A swarm of liberal political pundits and journalists had spent the previous weeks denouncing any questions about Fetterman’s health as illegitimate, while attacking the few reporters who dared raise such questions as heartless bigots and right-wing shills. In the process, they unintentionally revealed something essential about how the elite media distorts the public’s understanding of key issues by bullying journalists into repeating obvious lies.
Case in point: NBC News’ Dasha Burns. On Oct. 7, Burns conducted an on-camera interview with Fetterman. Because Fetterman has “auditory processing issues” as a result of the stroke, according to his campaign, he had to use a closed-captioning system to understand Burns’ questions. After the interview aired, Burns told NBC’s Lester Holt on air that Fetterman didn’t appear to understand her pre-interview banter. Burns was just doing her job by reporting on the fitness of a public official, but her assessment also seemed to lend credibility to the line of attack coming from Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, who has claimed that Fetterman is suffering from cognitive decline and covering it up. Simply for stating the facts as she had observed them, Burns was seen to be supporting the “wrong” candidate. … source