Reporters Congratulate Themselves on Being Shamed into Doing Their Jobs

‘H ell has no fury like a press corps deceived,” Axios reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote late last week. “Reporters feel duped — and some probably embarrassed — and are scrambling to unearth new evidence of [Joe Biden’s] decline.” VandeHei and Allen were attempting to explain the sudden outbreak of vigorous journalism around the president’s self-evident cognitive decline, but there was a self-congratulatory subtext to their words: Scorn the press corps, they seemed to be saying, and this is what you get. It’s an odd posture to strike. There’s nothing intimidating about an industry that has to be shamed into action.

But action is what we’re getting, albeit belatedly. The Associated Press reported late Tuesday night — and NBC News subsequently confirmed — the revelation that Biden sat down for a January 17 neurological exam, which contradicts White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s claim that White House visits by two well-known neurological experts had nothing to do with the president’s health.

The revelation that these doctors, one a Parkinson’s disease specialist who visited the White House eight times over as many months, visited the president spurred the White House press corps to give Jean-Pierre the sort of treatment usually reserved for hostile subjects. An exchange between the press secretary and CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe grew tense as the journalist pressed for details about the nature of the president’s consultations with the physicians and Jean-Pierre refused to give him any. Reporters, O’Keefe explained, were getting “miffed” over the way “information’s been shared with the press corps.”

Jean-Pierre seemed thrown by the front row’s suddenly adversarial demeanor, as was Jill Biden when she, too, was exposed to the Fourth Estate’s embitterment. “Why are you screaming at me?” the startled first lady replied when a Washington Post reporter asked for her thoughts on the Democratic Party’s deliberations over her husband’s fate. “You know me,” she continued before scurrying into a waiting car without answering the question.

If a siege mentality has descended on the Biden White House, it’s only because the Biden White House is suddenly besieged. This week, the Wall Street Journal discovered that the president felt compelled to “go to bed” before he could attend an informal event around the 2022 G-7 summit even though the event had been held “early in the evening” to accommodate the president’s preferences. “Biden didn’t show, surprising the chancellor and his aides,” the Journal reported.

A New York Times retrospective on Biden’s June trip across the Atlantic to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion featured European diplomats and attendees disclosing how “shocked” they were by Biden’s infirmity. He appeared “out of it,” “fragile and not really in charge,” and “dazed and confused,” showing “sharp decline” from previous years.

New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi’s deep dive into the worst-kept secret in American politics may be the most damning entry in this genre. Biden is reported to have “stared blankly” at a “Democratic megadonor and family friend” until he was reminded to say “hello.” “Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names,” Nuzzi wrote. One guest at a White House event came away from it appalled by the president’s inability to make it to the end of the reception. “The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda,” the report continued. “The president may not really be the acting president after all.”

This is hard-hitting investigative reporting, and it takes time to develop the sources required to flesh stories like these out. Perhaps it was the debate alone that shook those in Biden’s orbit out of their complacency and made these dispatches possible. But that doesn’t alone suffice to explain the sudden enthusiasm reporters have shown in their effort to chase those sources and their stories down. Nor does it explain the degree to which journalists have declined to paper over the president’s manifest impairment.

In a segment on his CNN program on Tuesday, host Jake Tapper exposed the degree to which even Biden’s efforts to reassure Democrats of his acuity have fallen short by simply reading verbatim transcripts of the president’s extemporaneous remarks. It was an effective tactic, but also one that could have been employed at any point in the president’s term — throughout which, Biden has mused over the “cumalidefasredsulc” benefits of student-debt forgiveness, touted his efforts to repair the country’s “bldhyindclapding,” and summed up his affection for America in a single word: “Asufutimaehaehfutbw.”

Allen and VandeHei’s observation about the press corps’ motives here is undeniably true, but it’s not something of which the press should be proud. The robust display of retrospective journalism to which Americans have been privy these last twelve days is a function of reporters’ professional embarrassment, yes, but also their anger over their own exploitation. An unspoken compact has been broken, and that infidelity must be punished. After all, you cannot be scorned if you never loved in the first place.