Joe Biden is using the apparatus of government to lean on legacy media outlets, telling them how they should be covering the Republican-led impeachment inquiry into the business dealings of the President, his son Hunter, and brother James, declaring it is “time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans”.
Biden special assistant Ian Sams has written to outlets including CNN, Fox News, and the New York Times insisting that the impeachment inquiry is “based on lies” and that “[c]overing impeachment as a process story – Republicans say X, but the White House says Y – is a disservice to the American public who relies on the independent press to hold those in power accountable.”
Sams, whose employers are the people in power, complained that “in the modern media environment, where every day liars and hucksters peddle disinformation and lies everywhere from Facebook to Fox, process stories that fail to unpack the illegitimacy of the claims on which House Republicans are basing all their actions, only serve to generate confusion, put false premises in people’s feeds, and obscure the truth.”
The intervention comes as a federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that the U.S. government violated the First Amendment, which protects freedom of the press and freedom of speech, by putting “unrelenting pressure” on social media platforms to suppress “millions of protected free speech postings” about the FBI and Hunter, COVID-19, and vaccines, among other topics.
