Initially, I intended to include Rainn Wilson’s zinger in my earlier post regarding the debate on CNN. However, this really does warrant a separate look at yet another defense of the mainstream media, and accusations that outsiders are responsible for its credibility collapse.
This time, the excuses come from MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle, who claims that the media’s low standing is the fault of … Elon Musk? Grasping at the Left’s latest bête noire, Ruhle claims that Musk’s “media machine” has manipulated people into mistrusting traditional media because Musk “want(s) you to go to X” to get information. Mistrust in the media is a conspiracy, Ruhle complains, and democracy is in danger!
“This is where I would push back,” says the star of The Office, and does so in a humorous and utterly cutting manner. Maybe the media has a Cleopatra Complex, Wilson concludes:
NEW: ‘The Office’ star Rainn Wilson claps back after MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle claims Elon Musk and Donald Trump are responsible for the public distrust of the mainstream media.
Wilson: “40% of Americans don’t trust mainstream media. Why is that? How did we get here?”
Ruhle:… pic.twitter.com/v7ohnXBzxl
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 22, 2025
Queen of Denial, indeed.
If democracy is in danger, Ruhle should look first to MSNBC, which fed its viewers an almost unending stream of progressive propaganda disguised as news. Ruhle’s contention that the media exists to hold government accountable is a joke in any context that includes the Protection Racket Media, but especially with MSNBC. No other media outlet tried to push the line harder than MSNBC that Joe Biden was fully competent, Sharp As A Tack®, and in one embarrassing moment, that Biden was the “best version of himself” ever. That was just a few weeks before the June 27 debate that exposed the years-long cover-up of Biden’s senility, which MSNBC still won’t address.
In other words, MSNBC took part in attempting to subvert democracy by covering up the fact that Biden could not possibly have been competent enough to run for a second term, let alone complete the term he was currently serving. Biden was being propped up for another four years as a puppet for someone or someones to exercise power And that is a direct assault on American democracy, one that lasted at least since the Easter Bunny ordered a confused and wandering Biden off the rope line in April 2022, and according to some reports, even before Biden took office at all.
Not one mainstream media organization bothered to follow up on this at that time, especially not NSNBC or Ruhle. They didn’t follow up on all sorts of other indicators either, even though they might have found a scoop had they bothered to ask. Andrew Stiles has perused the burgeoning Now It Can Be Told literary genre to discover that Democrats knew full well that Biden had serious cognition failures as early as 2021:
From the moment Biden shuffled on stage at the CNN debate and bragged about beating Medicare in June 2024, there has been a steady stream of revelations about all the Democrats who were (privately) concerned or even shocked by the extent of Biden’s cognitive decline since taking office in 2021. They didn’t say anything at the time, obviously, because they didn’t want to anger the president—a notoriously vindictive narcissist—and they didn’t want to help Donald Trump by validating his attacks on Biden’s fitness for office. Two recently published books—Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple—shed even more light on the Democratic Party’s abject failure to stop Biden from running for reelection, even though many believed he was too old and cognitively impaired to serve another four years.
Now it can all be told. Here are 30 examples, based on reporting that emerged suddenly (and conveniently) after the disastrous debate had removed all doubt regarding Biden’s decline, of powerful Democrats expressing their (private) concern about the president’s age and health.
Had the mainstream media actually desired to hold the government accountable, as Ruhle claims, they would have pressed for answers at least by that April 2022 Easter event. They were not interested in holding a Democrat-run government accountable, however; they were only interested in propping Biden up to get their ideological agenda moved forward. As Huhgh Hewitt wrote this morning, they acted like a Praetorian guard rather than a Fourth Estate:
Many, many people knew what they saw and said it out loud, only to have the Beltway’s Praetorian Guard embedded in both legacy media and throughout the Administrative State rally around the infirm president in order to preserve their power and their “access.” The “Constitutional… https://t.co/EQqoOw7WNn
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) April 23, 2025
The “Constitutional crisis” the same gang loves to pretend to worry about doesn’t exist now but if it has ever existed since the Civil War —a crisis for which the Constitution exists to prevent or to resolve— it is behind us.
And they missed it, or they deliberately covered it up. There is no third option. And given the uncritical manner and enthusiasm in which the media — and especially MSNBC — regurgitated the Sharp As A Tack!® and “cheap fakes” narratives, it’s pretty clearly the latter.
That’s not on Elon Musk. It’s not on CNN’s right-wing “freaks” either. It’s on the Protection Racket Media, whose utter corruption and propaganda have demolished their credibility — and what little they have left is being destroyed by their Cleopatra Complex.
Ruhle is hardly the only media figure with a Cleopatra Complex. There is no indication that the Protection Racket Media has changed its spots, or even acknowledged their corruption and failure. They will continue to shift blame to everyone else — Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the independent platforms that call out their corruption and failure.
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