Did ‘The Media’ Hide Biden’s Aging?
Did ‘The Media’ Hide Biden’s Aging?
Don’t buy that bogus narrative—reporting on Biden’s mental acuity wasn’t hard to find.
EVER SINCE THE JUNE 27 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE imploded the Democratic narrative that Joe Biden’s age is a non-issue, we’ve seen a flood of reports on the president’s cognitive problems, some describing incidents and encounters going back years. This, in turn, has provoked questions about why these stories are only surfacing now. Not everyone is asking in good faith. On the Democratic side, some zealous partisans continue to insist that everything is fine and that anyone discussing Biden’s problems is helping fuel a media-driven feeding frenzy that aids Donald Trump. On the Republican side (and in some ostensibly nonpartisan “heterodox” spaces), a chorus of commentators is eager to make the opposite case: that “the media” are in the pocket of the Democrats and either deliberately covered up Biden’s health problems and declining mental acuity until they no longer could, or chose to look the other way.
On Fox News, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee suggested that the alleged media coverup validated Trump’s slam at the press as “the enemy of the people.”
In a long tweet, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who recently announced his support for Trump, wrote that “the media deserve far more derision and scorn” than Democrats for keeping Biden’s problems under wraps:
@60Minutes knew.
The @nytimes knew.
@CNN knew.
@MSNBC knew.
Left wing media have had total and complete access to the president, his staff, and his administration.
They all knew, but they told you otherwise. They outright lied to you.
(The notion that these outlets “had total and complete access” to the president would come as a surprise to their reporters and producers, whose relationship with the Biden White House was often notoriously adversarial; more on that shortly.)
Elon Musk weighed in with his own more laconic take: “The legacy media are just propaganda puppets. X has the truth,” he tweeted, commenting on a video compilation that showed Democratic spokespersons and partisan pundits (not journalists with a claim to objectivity) reciting talking points about Biden’s sharpness.
Bari Weiss’s post-debate commentary on her site, the Free Press, was headlined, “They knew,” and declared that the debate was “a catastrophe” not only for the Biden campaign but “for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game.” (She too linked to a video that features political operatives and openly partisan pundits such as economist Paul Krugman.)
One Free Press columnist, culture critic Kat Rosenfield, tweeted a somewhat more measured comment accusing the press of ideologically driven incuriosity:
In fact, the media-was-covering-for-Biden-all-this-time narrative doesn’t hold water. To see why, let’s take a close look at some of its claims and assumptions.
A FEW WORDS OF PREFACE BEFORE DIGGING IN: Media criticism, including criticism of media bias, is a time-honored genre (I have contributed to it myself), and one arguably important to the wellbeing of our democracy. There is little question that journalists working in the “elite” media have long skewed disproportionately liberal, though this imbalance was usually expressed not in conscious partisanship so much as a tendency to assume that liberal or progressive views are a default neutral position. All this has been complicated in recent decades by the rise, on the right, of influential conservative media outlets, some of which became disturbingly cozy with Donald Trump, and on the left, of a new generation of progressive journalists who often see the advancement of social justice as part of their professional mission and frown on the expression of “hurtful” opinions.
In this year’s presidential election, there are compelling reasons beyond partisanship to favor Biden over Trump. But that hardly translates into a knee-jerk impulse to cover for Biden’s diminished capacity—especially before April 2023, when Biden formally announced his run for a second term. More aggressive coverage of his aging-related problems would almost certainly have left the Democrats in a much stronger position today with a more viable candidate.
Was the coverage good enough? Obviously not, as many journalists now acknowledge. But the reasons are many and complicated, from the Biden staff’s aggressive access-policing (notwithstanding Bill Ackman’s overwrought fantasies, news organizations like the New York Times complained vociferously about lack of access) to fear of reader backlash to, yes, fear of helping elect Trump, as former Times executive editor Jill Abramson suggested to Semafor. And to claim that the coverage was nonexistent or barely existent simply doesn’t correspond with the facts.
For that matter, some of the material touted as evidence of media collusion and coverup undercuts that narrative. Take the video supercut linked by Weiss in which various talking heads defend Biden’s acuity: It shows, at 1:36, Democratic political strategist Chai Komanduri complaining that “Americans and reporters in the media are just judging [Biden] by his physical appearance, and it’s horribly unfair.” The complaint about the media’s supposed speculation about Biden’s age and competence is even in the MSNBC chyron:
HERE’S ONE EXAMPLE of how the media treated an episode relevant to Biden’s age and mental fitness—one that many see as early alarm bell. In September 2022, during a White House conference on hunger, Biden called out to Rep. Jackie Walorski, a Republican congresswoman from Indiana who had worked on anti-hunger legislation: “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” In fact, Walorski had been killed in a car crash nearly two months earlier; at the time, Biden had issued a statement expressing shock and sadness at her death and reportedly made a condolence call to her family. His scripted remarks for the event mentioned the tragedy as well.
The disturbing lapse was covered, among others, by the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, NBC News and National Public Radio; Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was grilled about it by reporters from mainstream news organizations. A few days later, it was the lead in a column by Washington Post editorial writer and columnist James Hohmann which made a worrying observation: that Biden wasn’t doing much campaigning for Democratic candidates in the midterm elections and that, given “the Walorski gaffe,” this might be the best strategy. In October, Post columnist Megan McArdle, who is admittedly on the right side of the Post editorial lineup but still part of the “media class”—and a 2020 Biden voter—also cited this incident in a tough column discussing Biden’s fitness. In November, it was mentioned again in a long Post piece on the age issue as Biden contemplated another run. While the article mentioned “right-wing media channels” flogging the story, it also quoted Democratic voters who were not sanguine about the president’s ability to serve another term.
A year later, in September 2023, the Post ran several more articles on the topic. While they focused mainly on polls showing that age was an issue for the electorate, the reporting also acknowledged real problems:
Biden’s gait can be stiff, and his physical and verbal stumbles have at times given his critics material. . . . [O]ne House Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment of Biden’s candidacy, said he has heard concerns among fellow members as well as major Democratic donors about whether the president can sustain a grueling campaign and another four years in office.
On September 12, 2023, one of the paper’s leading columnists, David Ignatius, wrote a blunt column urging Biden to bow out of the race even as he praised the president’s record.
The New York Times also gave the question of Biden’s age and mental fitness plenty of coverage, particularly after Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, released on February 8 of this year, which mentioned Biden’s self-presentation as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” A February 9 editorial used startlingly strong language to discuss “the challenges of an aging president,” citing polls that showed “a remarkably broad swath of the American public” doubting his ability to serve another term because of age:
Mr. Biden’s performance at his news conference on Thursday night was intended to assure the public that his memory is fine and argue that Mr. Hur was out of line; instead, the president raised more questions about his cognitive sharpness and temperament, as he delivered emotional and snappish retorts in a moment when people were looking for steady, even and capable responses to fair questions about his fitness. . . .
Mr. Biden’s allies are already going to the usual Washington playbook of dismissing the special counsel’s report as partisan. Regardless of Mr. Hur’s motivation, the details that he presented spoke to worries voters already had. The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly. . . .
As it stands, he has had less substantive, unscripted interaction with the public and the press than any other president in recent memory. . . . [T]he combination of Mr. Biden’s age and his absence from the public stage has eroded the public’s confidence. He looks as if he is hiding, or worse, being hidden.
Two Times columnists, Maureen Dowd and David French, also weighed in with hard-hitting articles. (Granted, Krugman, in his own Times column, pushed back with a piece that called the age furor “disgusting.”) And a few days later, there was a long audio essay on the subject on Ezra Klein’s Times podcast.
Was this the first time the Times addressed Biden’s age problem? Nope. The paper ran a tough editorial about it on April 22, 2023—three days before Biden made his formal announcement about running for a second term—which raised the same issues: The likelihood of infirmities at Biden’s age, the signs of decline, the lack of openness, the “refusal to engage with the public regularly,” the lack of mention of cognitive abilities in his most recent health assessment. The editorial also cited a Times news story from July 2022 discussing the president’s growing physical frailty, mental lapses, and lack of unscripted interaction with the public.
You know how else we know that the Times was covering the Biden age issue? Because it got endlessly blasted for it from the left, as journalist Joel Mathis noted in his Substack newsletter after the debate. In February, the Times-bashing over this issue got so intense that Politico media writer Jack Shafer felt he had to come to the paper’s defense. There was also angry blowback from the Biden White House, as detailed in another story in Politico—which floated the unsubstantiated theory that Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger was amping up the Biden negativity as a vendetta against Biden’s refusal to do a sit-down interview with the paper. (That claim also got a lot traction in left-wing haunts like Media Matters.)
Yet when Weiss acknowledged “notable exceptions” in her indictment of media complicity, the only item she mentioned from any major media source is Ezra Klein’s Times audio essay. Meanwhile, the Free Beacon’s Peter Hasson tweeted that ever since Biden ran against Trump in 2020, “the media closed ranks and largely stopped covering Biden’s mental fitness—and the stories they did devote to the subject largely consisted of debunking alleged republican overreach.”
“Largely” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Twice.
TODAY, THE TIMES-BASHERS on the right or in the anti-anti-Trump “center” cite, as their Exhibit A, a recent Times story titled, “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts.” Okay, but here’s the thing: The videos, such as the one that supposedly showed Biden trying to sit down on a nonexistent chair or purposelessly wandering off at the G-7 meeting, really were misleadingly cropped. The chair was there; Biden had stepped away from the group to talk to one of the skydivers doing a show for the group. Yes, the uncut video still showed Biden looking frail and perhaps foggy. But when you deceptively edit a clip, guess what: People focus on the deception. And when you flood the zone with deceptive agitprop intended to make a certain point (remember the “sick Hillary” memes?), it’s going to make people more skeptical of even legitimate information that leans in the same general direction.1
The media-bashing also reflects assumptions that are far removed from reality—for instance, that Biden currently has severe dementia to the point of mental incompetence and that everyone who wasn’t either a liar or hopelessly biased could “clearly see [it] for years.” Never mind that the current stories detailing the president’s decline generally say that it’s only in the past year that it has become a clear and present problem. (Huckabee said the same thing in his recent Fox News appearance.) Never mind, too, that there is virtually universal agreement that Biden’s levels of mental acuity are very uneven; the controversial Wall Street Journal report that discussed his aging-related problems at the start of June, and was dismissed as a hit piece by Media Matters and others, reported that the president’s “demeanor and command of the details seemed to shift from one day to the next.” The fact that Biden’s reputation for gaffes trailed him even in his prime further muddied the waters.
And never mind, yet again, that a lot of people in Camp Trump were sufficiently worried about Biden hitting it out of the ballpark on June 27 that they were preemptively speculating about performance-enhancing drugs—or that Kevin McCarthy, one of the people quoted in the Journal, warned on Fox News against “lower[ing] expectations” for the debate because Biden could be “very engaged.”
The Journal story, by the way, is a good example of why the inadequate coverage of the age-and-fitness issue has far less sinister explanations than “media coverup.” The reporters, who worked on the story for months, interviewed “more than 45 people . . . who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously.” Yet all the sources except a few Republicans (including McCarthy and current House Speaker Mike Johnson) were anonymous, and the piece was easy to dismiss as a partisan attack.
Of course there were people in the media who showed themselves to be partisan hacks as well: podcast host and former New Republic staffer Brian Beutler urged the Journal to “retract its egregious hit job” after McCarthy said the same thing he was quoted as saying in the article, namely that Biden had good days and bad days. And of course one can say that the media in general should have been more aggressive in pursuing the story. But it’s useful to remember that the reason the floodgates have opened now is not that journalists are finally willing to write these stories, but rather because (1) a new specific incident—Biden’s debate performance—elevated the newsworthiness of what otherwise was an ongoing, day-by-day story of human decline; (2) Democratic strategists and administration staffers are more willing to talk.
Again: Media criticism is fine. But when it comes from people who never have anything critical to say about the right-wing noise and fog machine; who use the critiques to demonize mainstream journalism while positioning themselves as the sole purveyors of truth; and who, finally, have plenty to say about Biden’s age but nothing about the abundant evidence of Trump’s unfitness for office, maybe media integrity isn’t the real agenda.
A week before the debate, I myself wrote about the videos and the question of Biden’s age and mental fitness for Newsday, acknowledging the import of the issue and rejecting the White House contention that the videos were “fakes”; but I also wrote that the clips were deceptively cropped and did not, in context, make a strong case for Biden’s decline. I stand by that opinion. I also wrote that the question would be settled by the debate.