How the US liberal media turned on Biden – and missed the blinding truth in front of them
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The US media has finally turned on Joe Biden. Conservative outlets always disliked him, of course, but liberal-leaning journalists have provided cover for years – hitting Trump, praising Biden and downplaying the president’s physical decline.
But at the June 27 debate, the evidence became irrefutable. Biden, mumbling and confused, looked like a man who’d spotted a light and was tempted to walk towards it. The Washington Post called his performance “ninety minutes of pain”. The New York Times concluded, “To serve his country, President Biden should leave the race.”
Yet Biden’s weakness had been obvious for a long time before the debate. The White House did its best to cover it up; the liberal media, say critics, colluded – even gaslit the public. The story of how reporters turned from enablers to critics of this administration is a tragedy of politics and ethics.
A timeline of complacency
Trump’s shock election in 2016 transformed the US media. They blamed disinformation; they felt guilt for giving Trump so much coverage and failing to check his facts. Some outlets, such as CNN, made the conscious decision to go the other way. CNN hired Jim Acosta as its White House correspondent to hound the new president in aggressive and moralistic terms: it wasn’t my job, explained Acosta, to “whistle past the graveyard”. Journalists must call out corruption where they saw it.
But if democracy itself was at stake, and if reporters were obliged to expose Trump’s sins, what should be their relationship to his opponents? In 2019, the The New York Times editorial board sat down with 77-year-old Joe Biden, then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, and noted that he got “tangled in his own syntax” – but published his claim that he could do 44 push-ups. The paper endorsed him in October 2020, calling him a “bridge to the party’s next generation of leaders”.
But behind the scenes, relations were strained. Biden is working-class and pragmatic; the media is dominated by graduates with a liberal ideology. The New York Times felt entitled to privileged access to a Democrat candidate – yet found that Biden was tricky to access. His controlled campaign events and infrequent interviews were excused by lockdown; his word-mangling, The Atlantic explained, the symptom of a life-long stutter (by implication, to question it was unkind: ableism).
After his victory, the purdah turned out to be semi-permanent. Biden in office has done the least amount of press conferences and interviews since Reagan. When he did field a question about his age, he liked to joke (“I know I’m 198 years old”) or defiantly say “watch me”. Well, journalists duly noted that his gait is rather stiff, that he has trouble with steps and takes long breaks between appearances. A reviving economy and his surprise win in the 2022 midterms perhaps rendered the subject moot, but the Gaza crisis, which prompted soul-searching in newsrooms, where the old and the young frequently clash over culture, added to the sense that he was losing control of events.
In September 2023, the Axios website reported that Biden, now 80, had been wearing tennis shoes to avoid falling over. The White House called such reportage trivial, fitting “an unfortunate pattern of media attempting to sensationalise something that has long been public”.
The wake-up call – and the panic
It was February 2024 that the subject truly came to a head. Former US Attorney Robert Hur published his report into Biden’s mishandling of state documents, describing the president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. Media figures ran to the president’s defence: Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called the report “random… irrelevant… politically charged, Trump-like ramblings”. The president gave an angry rebuttal at a press conference, only to compound matters by referring to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico. He regained ground with a fiery State of the Union, and as he sailed through the Democratic primaries essentially unchallenged, Scarborough described him as not just “cogent” but “better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically”.
This was not how the public saw it. In March, The New York Times released a poll that found a majority of Biden voters thought he was too elderly to be effective. Jeff Jarvis, a professor of journalism, angrily asked “Who made age an ‘issue’?” Why were liberal outlets amplifying a Republican attack line, rather than exposing Trump’s corruption?
That month, The Washington Post published a piece that became typical of the Biden case for the defence: he stumbles in public, but he’s sharp as a tack in the office. The president, disclosed the newspaper in the style of Pravda doing “at home with the Stalins”, is an avid reader of briefs, with an alert mind who runs rings round his staff. “In private… Biden swears. He raises his voice. He demands more information. He dresses down aides, on occasion threatening to fire them, though he never does.” One might conclude that Biden isn’t very nice. Either way, the piece was contradicted in early June by the Right-wing Wall Street Journal, which disclosed that when Biden met congressional leaders to discuss Ukraine “he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him… read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.”
MSNBC regular Mike Barnicle called this a “classic hit piece, probably ordered up by the 93-year-old, fifth-time married Rupert Murdoch”.
The White House found allies in its pushback campaign. In mid-June, the administration claimed that videos showing the President looking addled or vague on a trip to Europe were “cheap fakes”, edited in such a way that distorted what was going on – going so far as to suggest they were “deep fakes”, as if the events they presented hadn’t happened at all.
Though sticking, wisely, to the cheap fake definition, The Washington Post reported on “the fast spread of politically damaging manipulated videos” – and The New York Times also labelled them “misleading videos” that contribute to a “distorted, online version” of Biden. Headed into the debate, we might characterise the liberal media’s position as: Biden has an age issue, but it’s presentational, not substantive. Satirist Jon Stewart of The Daily Show compiled a reel of pundit advice on what the President needed to do to dispel the Right-wing caricature: “he cannot have a senior moment”, he “mustn’t forget something”, he must “stay alert, stay engaged… stay awake.”
In short, the pundit class set the bar for success in the debate preposterously low. Joe failed to clear it. Afterwards, there was panic. Thomas Friedman of the NYT said he had wept; Scarborough now advised that were Biden the CEO of a company, that company would have to think about dumping him. The NYT screamed for the Democrat to step aside.
If the editorial boards thought their condemnation would force the president to consider reopening the nomination, they overestimated their influence. Over the weekend after the debate, his family rallied; so, too, did loyal Democrats. On Monday morning, Scarborough was on holiday from his show, and his co-host Mika Brzezinski denounced the “screaming, mocking, jeering” reaction to events. Biden had a bad night, okay; but Brzezinski blamed his staff, who themselves blamed, first, Biden’s cold and, then, his jet-lag. Brzezinski, in a turn that would characterise the Biden counterattack, criticised those “who have missed a massive story on the other side or have become inured to it”.
Why, liberals began to ask, are people talking more about Biden’s brain-freezes than Trump’s lies? The real villain of the piece was CNN for failing to fact-check what Trump said on the night – forcing Biden to do their job for them, which is why he was unable to hammer home his own message. The president insisted he was going nowhere.
Media critics of Biden have simply acted too late. Liberals raising their fears louder in 2023 might have affected the primaries, but now they’re over, Biden controls the delegates and thus cannot be removed by force. Journalists were caught between the old-fashioned instinct to report the facts vs their fear that criticising Biden too harshly might lead to a second term for Trump. It’s a result that now seems more likely, not less.
Jill Abramsom, a former executive editor of The New York Times, said, “The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the president’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age.” She concluded: “It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable.”
