Fact-checked: Mainstream media always ready to attack Trump, defend Biden

10/18/2022 / By Mary Villareal

Mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times (NYT) are quick to attack former President Donald Trump every chance they get. But they are turning into fierce defenders when the topic is incumbent President Joe Biden.

An NYT piece authored by its White House correspondent Michael Shear and former PolitiFact fact-checker Linda Qiu pointed out that Biden “has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity.” It also downplayed his constant fibs as nothing more than the stories which are “sometimes only loosely based on facts.”

In particular, the article addressed Biden’s claim of having “a house burn down with my wife in it.” The truth was actually a lot less dramatic – it was simply a small kitchen fire that was extinguished in 20 minutes. (Related: Biden’s new “disinformation” czar has a history of perpetuating left-wing propaganda in U.S., Europe.)

It was not an isolated example of embellishment, either. Some of Biden’s tall tales included having been a fierce civil right activist who was repeatedly arrested, having been an award-winning student with three degrees and just last week while speaking on the hurricane-devastated island of Puerto Rico, claimed that he “had been raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.”

The NYT piece ultimately stated that he “embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience” as an excuse for his consistent tendency to lie.

“Fact-checker” calls out Biden’s critics

Qiu, a designated “fact-checker,” knew of Biden’s habitual spinning. However, she hasn’t fact-checked him since August 2021 regarding the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco. Her headline? “Clarifying Biden’s Take of Evacuation.”

An archive of her articles since then included at least 14 “fact-checks” of Republicans or conservatives, and the sheer imbalance of 14-1 in target selection is reminiscent of Qiu’s work in PolitiFact before joining NYT.

Qiu also corrected Republicans on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, which one-third of GOP members deemed “mainly peaceful.”

On March 9, Qiu wrote an article saying the GOP wrongly blamed Biden for rising gas prices, insisting that the primary reason was the pandemic and the disruptions to global supply and demand.

Two months later on May 13, the fact-checker insisted that Biden couldn’t be blamed when the administration provided baby formula to illegal immigrants while citizens couldn’t find it in stores as it is “required by a lawsuit settlement.”

She later quoted Rep. Ruben Gallego (R-AZ), saying that the GOP is “the pro-starvation caucus” without drawing fact checks.

On May 28, she tried to pick apart claims at the National Rifle Association convention that Chicago was the “gun violence capital” of America, protesting that the city with the most gun murders cannot be called the gun violence capital. Comically, she insisted smaller cities had a higher murder rate per capita.

This imbalanced pattern of targeting explains why conservatives are hostile to fact-checkers: They don’t always give the right facts. Liberal journalists, in particular, claim that conservatives give “misleading” or “false” news while they are “disagreeing” and nitpicking the information given to them.

The mainstream media has been generous with its metaphors in describing Biden’s lies, but not with Trump – calling the latter a liar straight up.

But Trump is not the one facing judgment here. Biden said he’d be different from his predecessor. A spokesman for the White House said “Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the Oval Office,” despite all his “embellishments.”

Apparently, there’s a line for the mainstream media: It’s okay to lie, as long as you’re not Trump.

Visit NYTWatch.com for more stories about the mainstream media bias toward Biden.

Watch the video below to learn how the NYT is slowly turning on Biden.

This video is from the NewsClips channel on Brighteon.com.