the press brought this up! Dont mistake the no true scotsman fallacy here.

It was openly discussed that Biden was not looking sharp (even though Trump couldn't hold a debate with a mirror).

Biden Stepped down, mid cycle - this was something unthinkable to election strategists and pundits.

It remains one of the most amazing things I've seen, because I understand what it takes to do that, and what many others did in a similar position.

If you want to talk about how perceptions are made - consider that less is made of Biden's actions here, and more is made of the fact that he ran at all.

Did you know that the Russia case resulted in 8 guilty please and 1 conviction? Trump didn't get touched because they knew of the Russian interference, but didnt expect it to harm them.

A sitting president cant be indicted on federal crimes, so the obstruction of justice case was dropped.

This is unfortunate, since it gives ammunition to everyone, at which point it just becomes a team sport.

However, having seen authoritarian states, this is 100% from that play book. And yes, it feels insane and high strung to write that, but what can one do?

It looks like a wolf, it bites like a wolf, but maybe its just a massive dog.

> We really have no way of knowing that. It's not like there is any organization that analyzes and critiques the mainstream press in any regular fashion

The "mainstream press" is actually hundreds or thousands of individual institutions, some big, small, and each have their own flaws, strengths, biases, audiences, cultures and incentives. They compete with and often criticize/check one another. It's not even all that unusual for an editorial columnists to lambast their own publications.

I don't want to idealize it too much, but feedback loops for self-correction are baked into the pie, and they do actually work from time to time.

There's a completely different physics in the right-wing media world though, best illustrated by the aftermath of the 2020 election. Fox had to pivot hard to election denialism because they were getting killed in the ratings by upstarts like Newsmax and OANN who went all in on the election lies. The right-wing media feedback loops don't self-correct, they incentivize extremism, grievance and conspiracy theory.

> For instance, the press clearly knew that Biden had major cognitive impairments but they misreported it to the public. There was no accountability at all when the truth was discovered.

This is mostly right-wing media fiction. Stories and commentary on Biden's age were quite frequent in my experience.

(There's basically a whole genre of faux right-wing media criticism in the style of: "The mainstream media won't talk about X...", even while headlines about X all over the place in on "mainstream" media outlets)

> Same with the story of Trump colluding with Russia

It's not quite that simple. That's not a single story, it's was an ongoing series of stories and investigations that developed over time.

There was plenty of measured, careful reporting around all of that stuff. There was plenty of irresponsible reporting too. There was also plenty of self-flagellation afterwards over a lot of it.

(The Trump campaign, along with folks in it's orbit, did collude with Russia. People went to jail. Paul Manafort literally met a Russian spy on a park bench, kind of like you see in the spy movies, to covertly hand over proprietary voter data. Roger Stone was coordinating with Russian hackers and wikileaks to leak hacked DNC data, etc.)

> I'm skeptical of all the talk about "authoritarianism."

If you can't recognize it as a sign of authoritarianism when a sitting president nearly murdered an entire building full of cops, legislators, staff and his own vice president in a mad, desperate bid to nullify an election and seize power, I'm not sure what can break through.

But we are backsliding, there's no doubt about that. How far we fallback will depend on how effectively we oppose... well.. the current ruling party as it currently exists.