The political press is getting paranoid about the public’s ability to decipher reality from the activist narratives peddled by partisan reporters.

On Tuesday, NBC piled on to the gaslighting commentary from the White House and legacy media with aims to discredit observations of President Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline.

“Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral. The fact-checks have trouble keeping up,” headlined NBC’s reporting.

“The Republican National Committee, major conservative media outlets and right-wing influencers have succeeded in blasting out videos that they claim show ‘proof’ of Biden’s wandering off, freezing up or even filling his pants with a substance commonly represented by a brown swirl emoji,” NBC reported. “Independent fact-checkers and the Biden campaign have pointed out that the videos, while they are un-doctored by artificial intelligence, tend to crumble under even basic scrutiny, such as when the moments are viewed in context or from wider camera angles.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday that viral videos showing the commander-in-chief in decline were “cheap fakes.” Of course, Americans can simply watch for themselves as their geriatric president awkwardly froze up and blankly stared before former President Barack Obama led him off a stage over the weekend. Americans have also been able to hear the president mumble incoherently in speeches even before he was elected.

And yet the same press that lied to Americans about the origins of Covid, the Russia collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop, and inflation as “transitory” is incredulous over the 81-year-old president’s demonstrable deterioration on the world stage.

Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi outlined some of the media “fact checks” surrounding Biden’s age on Tuesday.

The Washington Post’s factcheckers argue that a video of a perplexed Biden at the G7 summit in Apulia, Italy, was achieved by “deceptive framing.” The headline of the piece read, “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply misleads.”

Deeply? The Post offers an alternative video of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni gathering Biden before the president could wander away that is probably more misleading than the original. It was edited to exclude the fact that Biden is completely out of sync with every other world leader, all of whom are paying attention to the parachuter who landed right in front of them. Despite the Four Pinocchios, both clips show him “meandering.”

The Associated Press, meanwhile, relied on a collection of White House staff and a “spokesperson for [Jimmy] Kimmel” to claim last weekend’s video featuring help from President Obama was deceptive.

The unfortunate reality for the state of the republic is that Americans don’t read anymore. A 2022 Gallup survey found Americans are reading fewer books than ever since the pollster began to probe the question in 1990. Government data shows that those over the age of 15 who do read spend an average of less than 30 minutes a day doing so, while most Americans spend nearly three hours per day watching television. The Pew Research Center reported in 2021 that roughly a quarter of Americans hadn’t even read a full book over the prior year, even in audio format.

To the public, it’s evidence of intelligence decline in a republic where the next generation is stuck playing catch up from two years of lost class time. To the press, it’s an opportunity to tell people not just what to think but how to think. That’s why the media’s obsession with “fact-checking” to cultivate a monopoly on truth has embraced a new sense of urgency five months from the next election. With Americans watching more television than ever, the press is working overtime to keep voters from believing their eyes.