"[American media] have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away..."

"... at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: 'As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.' They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away 'would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment' and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment. Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits."

Writes Rebecca Solnit, in "Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?" (The Guardian).

Solnit is very anti-Trump, as you'll see if you read the rest of the column. She goes on to say — "Speaking of coups" — that Trump "orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election" and is planning "yet another coup" through the implementation of Project 2025. She even uses the word "coup" to describe what the Supreme Court — with its Trump appointees — did in finding presidential immunity and in "dismantling the regulatory state."

I'm quoting her anyway, because she's questioning the motives and judgment of liberal media. I'd really like to know who decided a stampede was the right approach and unleashed it while the President was still on the debate stage. Immediately after the debate, CNN's John King was cued up to describe a stampede already in motion:

 

"Right now as we speak there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic party. It started minutes into the debate, and it continues right now. It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers, and they are having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal...."

As King described it, it's hard to see how they even watched the debate. They seem to have gone into cabal mode to capture the post-debate narrative. Was it — to use Solnit's phrase — "a sort of insider coup"? Who did this without knowing that they could — via stampede — drive their own candidate out of the race?

Solnit writes "Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup," but she's not talking about the stampede that seems to have begun mid-debate. She's talking about the 25th Amendment. That does, indeed, require the VP to participate in a constitutional procedure (not a coup!). 

I want to know who led the "deep... wide... very aggressive panic" that "started minutes into the debate" and communicated it to John King and motivated CNN to present this as the narrative, right after the debate, preempting any normal post-debate analysis and throwing the Democratic Party into chaos. Did someone decide to risk everything to shock and awe Joe Biden into submission? Who could do that? Who would do that?

And how did that old man — that supposedly broken down hopeless old man — resist? How could he resist? Who's helping him with his hero story, which is going strangely well against the deep, wide, aggressive panickers... whoever they are?