CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Years ago when I was a full-time radio reporter, I covered a city mayor who had just won his party’s primary. It was a tough hard-fought race.
As the mayor went onto stage to address his supporters, he was drunk. The mayor stumbled to the podium and was unable to read his prepared speech. Instead, in his drunken state, told the crowd how he intended to celebrate with his wife sexually when they got home, his handlers had to help him off the stage, as he nearly vomited on himself.
The mayor’s campaign manager passed out the text of what was going to be his speech that night. My report for the following morning said that – quote – the mayor, obviously inebriated – was unable to deliver remarks to his supporters. If you were there, that’s what actually happened. So that’s what I reported. I didn’t use the text of what hizzoner didn’t actually say.
Why can’t the national media do the same when covering Joe Biden?
Biden’s trip to Superior was a bumbling, incoherent disaster. Yet the news media that covers him just can’t report the events the way they happened.
The Biden campaign hasn’t posted video of the full speech from the Earth Rider Brewery. But it is available online. If you watch its entirety, you’ll see that Biden struggles to read off his teleprompter. He said he was in Superior, Minnesota. He confused “Tesla,” the electric-car maker, with “Tulsa,” a city in Oklahoma. The President praised his good friend Tony Evers and couldn’t recognize him in the front row of the crowd. There were parts of his speech where the president mumbled and slurred his words.
The written transcript released by his campaign cleans all of that up. So, why can’t national reporters, who are with Biden at every campaign event, include somewhere in their reporting, that the President appears as an old man who is barely coherent when speaking in public.
Remember, if you were there in person – all of this would have been obvious to you.
Some people call out talk show host Dan Bongino for referring to the president as oatmeal-brained or as a sock puppet. Disrespectful? Perhaps. But that’s a more honest description of Joe Biden that you will ever get from the reporters who cover him.
Chris Conley
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