In his important essay “How Media Coverage Drove Biden’s Political Plunge,” Perry Bacon Jr. has argued that after so many years of (justifiably) negative coverage of Trump, many in the media were desperate to find a big anti-Biden story that might inoculate them against accusations of left-wing bias.20 And they found it in Biden’s somewhat chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. This kind of performative objectivity, where journalists search for negativity anywhere they can find it and exaggerate what little they can find, had the truth-twisting effect of making it seem as if Biden’s
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