Status newsletter writer and former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy showed Wednesday how hate rages through his veins and soul at conservatives and particularly at “right-wing media” because he argued this “irresponsible,” “dishonest machine” filled with “malicious” intent — which contain plenty of good and decent people — “do not deserve” credit for being out in front of legacy (liberal) media on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
The headline and subhead were cartoonishly filled with hate: “The Right’s Biden Revisionism; For years, right-wing media pushed a warped narrative of Joe Biden as a brain-dead puppet controlled by sinister, shadowy forces. Now they’re demanding vindication—but they do not deserve it.”
He started by throwing a conniption over former colleague Jake Tapper going on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show for a barnburner of an interview. Darcy seethed at the line from tapper that “conservative media was right and conservative media was correct” that Biden had long been in decline.
So incensed he didn’t even consider whether Tapper actually meant it, he raged that Tapper falsely “simplifie[d] a much more nuanced media and political reality” that “[w]hile…the press should have covered Biden’s age with greater urgency—and to acknowledge that Biden clearly lost a step during his presidency—that’s a far cry from validating the deeply irresponsible narrative right-wing media spun for years[.]”
“That was never journalism. It was propaganda. Full stop,” he screeched.
Darcy then made excuses by whining “MAGA Media figures—particularly on Fox News—lobbed increasingly absurd claims about Biden’s mental faculties” and “painted him as a senile old man who didn’t know what day it was, who couldn’t walk unaided, and who spent his presidency dozing off[.]”
This went on with more excuses, all-but admitting the claims were right Biden “lacked the energy he once had” while raging we contemptible ilk were going off of vibes and weren’t real journalists in our analysis (click “expand”):
This wasn’t grounded in evidence. It wasn’t the result of deep reporting or careful observation. It was pure narrative warfare—an attempt to delegitimize Biden not just as a candidate but as a commander-in-chief. And the coverage became so cartoonish at times that no amount of fact-based reporting about Biden could pierce the right-wing media bubble.
None of this is to deny that Biden was aging. He was. By the end of his term, it was obvious to those around him—and to many voters—that he lacked the energy he once had. Even Democratic operatives privately acknowledged that he didn’t have his fastball anymore. But there’s a world of a difference between an 80-something president, who has always been prone to gaffes, showing his age and a man secretly suffering from debilitating dementia or worse. And conflating the two, as Fox News and its allies routinely did, wasn’t just misleading—it was malicious.
He came off like something our friends at the Babylon Bee cooked up. Check out this part as he excused the liberal media’s cover-up and/or passive view of Biden’s mental state while he was in office to merely being “cautious”:
Yes, Biden’s debate performance on CNN was troubling. Yes, the press should have been more aggressive in scrutinizing his capacity to serve a second term. But reporters who refrained from joining the right-wing media hysteria were not negligent or part of a cover-up—they were simply cautious. They understood the weight of diagnosing a president with a serious neurodegenerative disorder without hard evidence. And they understood the cost of being wrong[.]
This went right into deep-seated hatred: “MAGA Media’s goal was never honest diagnosis. It was political demolition. They weaponized Biden’s verbal gaffes, his slower gait, and his lower-energy demeanor to manufacture the idea that he was mentally vacant. Never mind that Biden managed the job without…chaos and confusion[.]”
No word on what Oliver thought about, say, Afghanistan.
He also implied conservative journalists aren’t real reporters:
That wasn’t journalism. It was performance…They weren’t gathering facts. They were throwing mud, hoping some of it would stick. ..That’s what makes the current revisionism so maddening. Now, with Tapper and Thompson’s book…MAGA Media figures are claiming vindication. They’re demanding apologies from journalists…But they weren’t right. They were irresponsible. They didn’t try to understand what was happening behind the scenes
After saying “their years of bad-faith character assassination” is not “noble,” Darcy concluded Biden wasn’t “perfect,” but he still “made decisions” despite being “under constant attack from a media machine” and thus “[n]o one owes that dishonest machine an apology.”
Go touch some grass, bro.
