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Well, well, well. Perhaps the Protection Racket Media has had enough of Joe Biden, too. Or at least enough of kowtowing to a clearly inept White House. 

On the other hand, Tony Dokoupil has a track record of getting in trouble for asking fact-based questions. Will this land Dokoupil into another progressive struggle session at CBS News? It’s too late for Tim Walz, who had to do the first shift of Biden cleanup this morning. 

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Trump’s campaign gleefully clipped the very first question out of the gate from Dokoupil:

That’s not an accurate transcription — and it’s a shame, because Dokoupil really does ask it well and comprehensively. He doesn’t just ask about Biden’s comment but ties it back to Democrat presidential messaging ever since 2008 in demeaning voters who don’t support their tickets:

DOKOUPIL: I want to get your reaction to the president’s comments, but I want to put it into a larger context of your recent comment comparing the Sunday Trump rally to a Nazi rally. And I would also throw in there Obama’s “bitter clingers,” guns and religion comment from a while back, the “deplorable” line from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the way that Democrats are seen by some voters as disrespecting them. And I have to ask, does that undercut this closing message of unity from your campaign? 

WALZ: No, certainly not …

That question should land Dokoupil in hot water at some point, but maybe he doesn’t much care after the Ta-Nehesi Coates debacle. 

Walz had more to say than just that — a lot more, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. The problem with this answer is what Dokoupil referenced in the question. Walz himself had equated the Madison Square Garden rally to a Nazi rally, which Walz reconfirmed earlier yesterday:

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Well, thanks to Biden, no one’s “leaving it at that” today. His longer answer to Dokupil wasn’t much better, either.  

Walz ended up filibustering for almost two minutes while avoiding a direct answer on how Biden’s “garbage” attack reflected on “unity.” When Walz finally came up for air, Nate Burleson wondered why Biden was in public at all, and whether he should have been kept in the closet. That doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence in Biden as a surrogate for the campaign.

CBS still appears to be something of an outlier in the mainstream media. Most of the rest of the industry tried to follow the absurd spin from the White House last night that inserted an apostrophe into the transcript to claim Biden only meant to reference comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Axios’ Alex Thompson has some hilarious background on that, in fact:

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On the call, Biden said: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

  • The White House argued that Biden was only referring to the comedian in his comments and sent a transcript in which Biden says: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s.”
  • Asked if they had spoken to the president to ask him what he meant before sending the transcript, the Biden spokesperson requested to go off the record. Axios declined and the White House did not respond further.

Why would the White House have to go off the record to explain an apostrophe? Is it a national security apostrophe? Was the apostrophe in the room at the time? Kudos to Thompson and Axios for maintaining some journalistic integrity on this absurdity. 

Unfortunately, that was in short supply at NPR:

Ditto for Bloomberg and Reuters:

The Protection Racket Media is circling the wagons around Biden and his apostrophe. But while CBS News didn’t exactly hammer Walz with this “garbage,” Dokoupil and Burleson addressed it head-on and in full and proper context. There may be some hope yet that some media outlets are reconsidering their position with consumers in the same manner Jeff Bezos has at the Washington Post. 

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