Hur’s report described Biden as a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’ Liberal pundits couldn’t possibly believe it.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look back at the media’s previous defenses of President Biden’s cognitive abilities in the wake of his disastrous debate performance and cover more media misses.
The Biden Age Issue Comes to a Head
In February, when special counsel Robert Hur’s report described President Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the mainstream media couldn’t possibly believe it.
He rides a bike after all, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told us. He couldn’t possibly be facing mental decline.
But the Biden Americans witnessed on stage at the first presidential debate last week was not the young-for-his-age 81-year-old Democrats and the media had portrayed. He struggled to form coherent sentences and at times appeared downright confused. (While the debate seems to have confirmed Hur’s findings in full view of the public, he may yet be further vindicated if House Republicans succeed in their effort to force the release of the audio tapes of his interview with Biden.)
In the wake of the live-action trainwreck, NR’s Charles C. W. Cooke has urged readers to remember who has lied to them about Biden’s mental fitness and cognitive abilities:
When they suggested that Biden was impressive and sharp behind closed doors, they were lying to us. When they talked about “cheapfakes” and “deceptive editing,” they were lying to us. When they pulled out the “misinformation experts say . . .” garbage, they were lying to us. When they proposed that Robert Hur’s report was “partisan” or “unfair,” they were lying to us.
So now, we’ll do just that. What follows is a look back at some of the worst offenses.
Just five months ago, when the Hur report claimed Biden’s “memory was significantly limited,” the mainstream media developed a narrative dismissing the claims because Hur apparently was not fit to make such a judgment. (Nevermind the fact that the president’s failing memory was put on display shortly after the report’s release, when, moments after he defended his memory in televised remarks, Biden appeared to refer to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico while answering a question about hostage negotiations in Gaza.)
Apparently only a neurologist can make observations about a person’s memory. MSNBC’s Molly Jong-Fast accused Hur of not being a “good faith actor.” “He’s not a neurologist, right?”
MSNBC’s Ari Melber accused Hur of being ageist, while Jeffrey Toobin appeared on CNN to criticize Hur for making “unnecessary points” about Biden’s age.
American environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben called Biden’s age his “superpower.”
That thing about Biden not being able to recall when his son Beau had died, even within several years? No cause for alarm, according to experts sourced by the mainstream media.
As NBC News reported at the time, “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”
At the New York Times, a neuroscientist told readers, “Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting [sic].”
“Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence, and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country,” writes Dr. Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Davis. “Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal of greater importance.”
Former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood also came to Biden’s defense at the time, sharing an interview he had done with Biden at the White House ten days before Hur did. Harwood also defended Biden’s less-than-reassuring press conference, claiming it “showed the same thing his performance in office has shown for 3 years: he can do the job.”
And former White House correspondent Brian Karem went so far as to say Biden should speak in front of the camera more often. Bloomberg columnist and podcast host Matthew Yglesias said Biden, “seems totally fine and I think needs to do more press.”
Just last month, the media spent a whole news cycle focused on dismissing video evidence of Biden’s decline as “cheap fakes,” with headlines like: “Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral. The fact-checks have trouble keeping up.” (NBC); “Right-wing media outlets use deceptively cropped video to misleadingly claim Biden wandered off at G7 summit,” (CNN); “Seeing is believing? Not necessarily when it comes to video clips of Biden and Trump,” (AP); and “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead,” (WaPo).
The Washington Post explains that “cheap fakes” are “deceptively edited videos” that “misrepresent events simply by manipulating video or audio, or by leaving out context” and that they’ve “become staples of Republican attacks against Biden.”
But after Biden’s cognitive abilities were on display on Thursday, even the most Biden-friendly media could no longer turn the other cheek.
MSNBC host Joy Reid said Obama and Biden allies were texting her that Biden appeared “extremely feeble and weak,” while MSNBC host Alex Wagner reported from the debate spin room that there had been a “uniformly negative reaction to Biden’s performance tonight.”
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said just last month, “I have spent a good bit of time talking to Kevin McCarthy through the years and hours with Biden in 2024. There is no comparison: Biden is far sharper, more intellectually curious, and far more insightful on global affairs than any House GOP speaker I have met over 30 years.”
But he did a quick post-debate about face, questioning whether Biden should remain in the race. “If he were CEO and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America keep him on as CEO?” he asked.
While the media hit a breaking point, Biden allies made the rounds on the Sunday shows in an attempt to assuage voter concerns.
Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) said Biden should “absolutely not” drop out of the race. Representative Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) said Sunday that President Biden should stay in the presidential race and dismissed his disastrous debate performance as a consequence of “preparation overload.”
But as far as the media was concerned, it appeared the damage was done.
The editorial boards of the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution have called on Biden to drop out of the race. (Still, the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer, however, confusingly doubled down on its support of Biden and suggested Trump is “the only person who should withdraw from the race.”)
And while a Politico headline acknowledged “Biden bombs,” the outlet apparently just couldn’t help itself from adding, “Trump pounces.”
Headline Fail of the Week
“A San Francisco store is shipping LGBTQ+ books to places where they are banned,” the Associated Press reports.
“In an effort she calls “Books Not Bans,” she sends titles about queer history, sexuality, romance and more — many of which are increasingly hard to come by in the face of a rapidly growing movement by conservative advocacy groups and lawmakers to ban them from public schools and libraries,”
Yet readers who make it toward the end of the story will come to understand that it is not LGBT books that are being banned anywhere in the U.S., but instead that it is children’s access to sexually explicit materials that is being restricted.
The article acknowledges that conservative group Moms for Liberty has challenged books only because they are sexually explicit, not because they cover LGBTQ+ topics. Just 38 percent of the book challenges that originated from the group have LGBT themes, the article notes.
Nonetheless, the founder of the “Books Not Bans” effort says she is sending books to states like Florida, Texas and Oklahoma – none of which ban LGBT reading materials.
Media Misses
• CNN appeared to abruptly end an interview with the president of Students for Life of America last week after the pro-lifer refuted host Jim Acosta’s claims that chemical abortion is safe.
Jim Acosta abruptly ends interview with Kristan Hawkins after just 90 seconds following heated debate on abortion pic.twitter.com/bbo8Gkf2IB
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 27, 2024
• “Bowman Falls in House Primary, Overtaken by Flood of Pro-Israel Money,” the New York Times reported last week before it quietly changed the headline to “Bowman Falls to Latimer in a Loss for Progressive Democrats.” MSNBC host Chris Hayes similarly claimed the race would have been a “dead heat” without the financial influence of pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Yet Bowman was trailing Latimer by 17 points before AIPAC ever began its ad campaign.
• The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz appears on the You’re Wrong About podcast to argue that actually, phones are good for kids. “This week, Taylor Lorenz fights our latest moral panic. Are phones really making kids anxious or are kids just good at noticing what’s going on?” a description for the episode reads.