'Desperate' right-wing media pushing Biden fakes as cover for Trump fumbles: Morning Joe

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and other "Morning Joe" panelists raised questions about misleading reports in right-wing media suggesting that president Joe Biden suffers from dementia.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a report quoting former House speaker Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans who questioned Biden's mental fitness, which were then aired on local broadcasts by Sinclair Media affiliates, while the New York Post and other conservative outlets pushed a deceptive video that appeared to show the president wander off from a gathering of world leaders.

"Am I shocked?" Scarborough said. "Am I shocked that the story and a couple of stories have gotten to the Wall Street Journal like the day after Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that Donald Trump was just out of his mind and people were laughing at him and group of CEOs the next morning, you know? You got the Wall Street Journal going, CEOs love Donald Trump coming out of the -- no, it's just not true. I'm so shocked. I'm shocked by so few things in the political realm any more, the media realm, that I hate to say it, but I will say, yes, I am shocked and that is the the Wall Street Journal."

Scarborough typically recommends the Journal to conservative friends who might otherwise get their news coverage from unreliable sources, and he was disappointed to see the newspaper stoop to the same level as other outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he and other panelists suggest the recent reports are being directed from the top.

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"I'm not any believer in conspiracies, but I do believe in coordination and, boy, this parachute thing was so coordinated," said Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, referring to the video suggesting Biden wandered off, when instead he had turned his attention to some parachutists upon their landing. "I wondered what that was about and Karine Jean-Pierre said it smacked a desperation. I've got to admit that that occurred to me because there was a certain desperate feel to it. You just look at the clip from a different angle and it's obliterates the story they are trying to tell."

Scarborough wondered why news organizations would be so willing to shred their own credibility by publishing easily debunked falsehoods.

"They put this up knowing they are going to be called out as liars, knowing that there are other angles that are going to prove that they are lying to their audience, that it will be exposed," Scarborough said. "That they lie today but the sun is going to rise tomorrow and the fact are going to become clear. People will wake up and say, 'They were lying to us and, yet, they didn't care.' Maybe they thought their readers are stupid, maybe they thought our readers live in a fact-free echo chamber. I don't know what they thought, but whatever it was, they were undervaluing and underestimating their readers."

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