The flood of reports on Biden’s deterioration is another form of the same careerist impulse that led media outlets to soft-pedal his condition in the first place.
The flood of reports on Biden’s deterioration is another form of the same careerist impulse that led media outlets to soft-pedal his condition in the first place.
S ummoning every ounce of sanctimony of which she’s capable, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson accused the political press of failing in its prime directive: holding the powerful to account. From her Olympian remove, Abramson determined that the press had failed to “poke through White House smoke screens” and pierce the “veil of secrecy surrounding the president,” thereby allowing Joe Biden’s praetorian guard to succeed “in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline.”
But we shouldn’t be too hard on the press. After all, “the President’s decline was a super hard story to report,” Abramson insists. Even the Wall Street Journal, which published an exposé on Biden’s deterioration in early June, “did not deliver.” She’s right, insofar as the paper’s reporters were compelled to rely on Republican sources in its June 4 story on Biden’s decline. If that story was unsatisfying, it was only because the White House reportedly “kept close tabs” on the Democrats who shared their experiences with Biden on the record. Ultimately, those Democrats reached out “a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths.” Representative Gregory Meeks even admitted that the White House insisted he should “call back” and clean up the record.
Chasing the White House’s activity down — at the very least, confirming that the president’s staff had put pressure on Democratic lawmakers to de-emphasize their discomfort with Biden’s fitness — was an achievable journalistic objective. Indeed, the sudden outbreak of journalism around the president’s condition confirms the degree to which media outlets could have contributed a few more details to the worst-kept secret in American politics.
Biden has “long experienced” senior moments, New York Times reporters confessed on Tuesday. “But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome,” the dispatch continued. That would be a bombshell if the remainder of the report wasn’t primarily devoted to color commentary on Biden’s uninspiring public appearances.
“One person familiar with the situation said some of the intelligence officials who give Biden his daily intelligence briefing had noticed his decline as early as last year, undermining claims from White House and campaign political figures about the president’s mental acuity,” the Financial Times revealed on Monday.
“Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on,” Politico revealed on Monday. “During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.”
The president’s rapidly shrinking inner circle and his cloistering by his family and senior advisers were hardly unknown to the press before last week’s debate. Biden’s increasingly frequent stumbles, verbal miscues, and memory lapses — moments that have made the president into a viral hit in social-media venues where content is curated not by the professional journalistic class but civilians who lacked a professional incentive to cover for the president — were obvious to all.
The press didn’t overlook all this. Rather, it actively suppressed the truth.
Take, for example, Times reporter Michael Shear’s 2023 dispatch from Vietnam, where Biden mumbled his way through an address to reporters following a G-20 summit until his staff gently ushered the president off stage. That was not the newsworthy event, in Shear’s estimation. Instead, it was the extent to which “conservative media outlets had seized” on Biden’s conduct. Even if Biden’s performance “would not have ranked among the best,” the White House believes that “stories about the president’s age and health are stoked by his enemies in an effort to undermine his accomplishments.” To traffic in such luridness is to be counted among Biden’s “enemies” (read: Republicans). And you wouldn’t want that, would you?
“The smear that he’s lost it — that he’s cognitively impaired” — is a “frequent explicit refrain within Republican-aligned media,” Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein wrote in 2022. This “smear” did seem to be substantiated by the president’s strange tendencies — shaking hands with no one in particular, calling on the recently deceased to stand and address the public, keeling over on a stationary bicycle, and describing the benefits of debt forgiveness as “cumalidefasredsulc.” But those who had the temerity to notice all this were attacked as “agist,” peddlers of a “caricature” of the president, and, worst of all, covert supporters of Donald Trump.
“How do you know Joe Biden is not going to finish his term?” George Stephanopoulos barked at Nikki Haley when the former South Carolina governor alleged that a vote for Biden in 2024 was, in reality, a vote for President Kamala Harris. “What is that based on?” It was based on the public’s elementary powers of observation — the substantiation of which Stephanopoulos might have been able to cite himself had the enterprise of which he is a part done its job.
“It can be tricky to report on something as difficult to define as a person aging, when his opponent is a convicted felon, who regularly lies and has threatened to use the government to go after his political opponents,” CNN’s Hadas Gold admitted on Thursday. It should not be “tricky” at all to show neither fear nor favor unless reporters and outlets alike convinced themselves that their job was not to chronicle events but to alter their trajectory. Therein lies the corruption at the root of almost all journalistic malpractice. The idea that journalists have a responsibility to convey “moral clarity” while wildly overestimating their own relevance and influence contributed as much to their humiliation today as anything else.
The cascade of stories retroactively detailing Biden’s mental decline is a make good. It is driven by the sudden realization that the debate robbed journalists of the plausible contention that Republicans had simply made up the president’s infirmities. In that sense, the flood of reports on Biden’s deterioration is another form of the same careerist impulse that led media outlets to soft-pedal the president’s condition in the first place. If reporters are experiencing sudden-onset self-consciousness, they should be. The White House didn’t “cover up” anything here. The press was willfully complicit in a campaign of spin so unconvincing that it could satisfy only those who desperately wanted to be convinced. If that describes the journalistic establishment, they have only themselves to blame.