Uh-oh.
This week the left-leaning CNN headlined this:
CNN Poll: Biden faces negative job ratings and concerns about his age as he gears up for 2024
The story reports this, in part:
CNN — President Joe Biden faces continued headwinds from broadly negative job ratings overall, widespread concerns about his age and decreased confidence among Democratic-aligned voters, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS.
There is no clear leader in a potential rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump, who is widely ahead in the GOP primary. And nearly half of registered voters (46%) say that any Republican presidential nominee would be a better choice than Biden in 2024.
….Views of Biden’s performance in office and on where the country stands are deeply negative in the new poll. His job approval rating stands at just 39%, and 58% say that his policies have made economic conditions in the US worse, up 8 points since last fall. Seventy percent say things in the country are going badly, a persistent negativity that has held for much of Biden’s time in office, and 51% say government should be doing more to solve the nation’s problems.”
What’s interesting here is that this poll isn’t from Fox or Newsmax or The Washington Times or any other conservative media outlet. It’s from CNN, famously a left leaning media outlet.
Liberal media outlets are notorious for, among other things , omission journalism. Which is to say, if there’s news out there that negatively reflects on some liberal politician or cause of the moment - it just doesn’t show up in liberal media or it's simply written up as discredited.
The classic example of this, of course, was the disappearance of the famous New York Post October 2020 story on Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.”
At the time CNN headlined this:
The anatomy of the New York Post’s dubious Hunter Biden story
The CNN report said this:
New York CNN Business — Last week, the New York Post published a dubious story about Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden.
The Post story claims Hunter Biden helped arrange a meeting between Joe Biden and an executive at a Ukrainian energy company Burisma in April 2015. The series of stories contained hacked materials and personal email addresses, so Twitter (TWTR) initially prevented people from posting links to the article, sending it via direct message and retweeting it.
As CNN’s Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter noted on ‘Reliable Sources’ Sunday, ‘We are not talking about fully reliable sources here,’ referring to the New York Post’s story.”
Actually the Post story was completely reliable. And later stories on the liberal media’s treatment of the story had headlines like this gleeful banner from the New York Post:
Washington Post joins New York Times in finally admitting emails from Hunter Biden laptop are real
The goal in omission journalism in this instance, of course, was to protect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. After-election surveys find it work, with enough Biden voters saying they would not have voted for him if they had seen the story.
By Friday afternoon of this past week Sean Hannity was on his radio show saying the biggest news to come out of the week was the CNN poll that accurately admitted - with no hiding or suppressing - that President Joe Biden was in fact in big trouble. The poll story pulled no punches, either, also saying this:
Perceptions of Biden personally are also broadly negative, with 58% saying they have an unfavorable impression of him. Fewer than half of Americans, 45%, say that Biden cares about people like them, with only 33% describing him as someone they’re proud to have as president. A smaller share of the public than ever now says that Biden inspires confidence (28%, down 7 percentage points from March) or that he has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president (26%, down 6 points from March), with those declines driven largely by Democrats and independents.
Roughly three-quarters of Americans say they’re seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current level of physical and mental competence (73%), and his ability to serve out another full term if reelected (76%), with a smaller 68% majority seriously concerned about his ability to understand the next generation’s concerns (that stands at 72% among those younger than 65, but just 57% of those 65 or older feel the same).
The real question now is whether CNN, post its recent leadership changes, is determined to be about just-the-news as it is - no matter how it reflects on either Joe Biden or any other liberal favorite of the moment?
In fact, as the nation heads into the cauldron that will be the 2024 election, with a GOP opposition raising countless questions about the decidedly shady Biden family business, his age, mental condition and more, will CNN be on the job reporting the facts? And if so, is that, as Hannity has also put it, the canary in the coal mine that says liberals are getting seriously uncomfortable with Biden and want him out of the race?
Or is it a return to the straight up just-the-facts journalism that made CNN what it was when it first appeared on the scene as created by founder Ted Turner?
Stay tuned.
