The Media’s Silence Over Joe Biden’s MeToo Allegations is Deafening
Corporate media is making it easy for Joe Biden to hide. | Source: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP
- It’s been a month since allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden surfaced.
- Now there’s a 1993 tape from Larry King Live that corroborates Tara Reade’s claims.
- But the media has covered this story very differently from Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations about Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
Apr 26 marks one month since Tara Reade told The Hill’s Krystal Ball that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her. Reade said Biden assaulted her in 1993 when she was a Senate staffer.
But if you follow the most mainstream news outlets in America, you might not even know it. A CCN.com investigation found a virtual media blackout of the story.
There is a stark inconsistency in reports, interviews, and op-eds about the allegations against Joe Biden compared to media coverage when Christine Blasey Ford made allegations about then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh in Sept 2018.
Before comparing coverage from several news outlets below, here is Tara Reade’s story.
Tara Reade: Joe Biden Raped Me in 1993
Last month Tara Reade also spoke with Current Affairs’ Katie Halper, telling her :
[Joe Biden’s] hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And then he went down my skirt, but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers.
Reade said when she pulled away, Joe Biden taunted her:
And then him saying to me when I pulled away, when he got finished doing what he was doing and I pulled back and he said, “come on man, I heard you liked me.”
She says she was shattered by what Biden did at that moment:
And for me it was like everything, everything shattered in that moment. I looked up to him, he was like my father’s age. He was this champion of women’s rights in my eyes. And I couldn’t believe that was happening.
Since making these revelations, the media has almost completely ignored her. Moreover, the MeToo movement’s standard-bearer, Alyssa Milano stands by her Joe Biden endorsement.
Media Silence Two Years After MeToo Movement
In 2018, the Senate confirmation hearings began for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexually assaulting her at a high school party in 1982.
After that, the hearing instantly became a media spectacle of non-stop coverage surrounding the allegations and an investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But here’s a shocking comparison between the mainstream media coverage of Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, and Reade’s charges about Joe Biden.
This many days after Christine Blasey Ford made her allegations public on Sept 16, 2018, NBCNews.com had published 208 pages referencing her.
That’s according to the Google search index of NBC News’ website using the query “Christine Blasey Ford,” and limiting results to those published from Sept 16, 2018 – Oct 17, 2018. Today, NBCNews.com has only two pages referencing Tara Reade.
During those 31 days, the New York Times published 300 pages with references to Ford on its website. But today, the Times has only published six reports. One of them is the New York Times’ executive editor defending the paper for waiting 19 days to make its first report .
Meanwhile, Google has indexed 312 pages on the Washington Post, referencing Christine Blasey Ford in the month following her accusation. But the Post has only published two reports and three op-eds covering what Reade has told us about Joe Biden.
Time’s Up for the Media and Joe Biden
On Friday, a tape dropped of a woman calling in to Larry King Live in 1993 to ask for advice about how to handle misconduct from a prominent U.S. senator.
I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington. My daughter has just left there after working for a prominent senator and could not get through with her problems at all. And the only thing she could have done was go to the press, but she chose not to do it out of respect for him.
The timing aligns exactly with Reade’s story. She tells reporters the caller was her mother, and the senator was Joe Biden. Most of the mainstream media still isn’t covering this.
Time’s up for the media to do its job, investigate Joe Biden more closely and allow the public to hear Tara Reade’s story. That’s far from asking the media or anyone to draw any conclusions. It’s just asking the media to do its job and cover the story, or at least what the media thought its job was during the Brett Kavanaugh hearing.
The black and white difference between the media’s coverage of these two stories strongly suggests two conclusions: corporate media is flagrantly biased toward Democratic candidates. And it’s no ally to the aims of the MeToo and TimesUp movement.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com.
