Perspective: Was the media complicit in concealing Biden’s struggles?

A former editor of The New York Times has accused the White House of conducting “a massive cover-up of the degree of the president’s feebleness and his serious physical decline” and chastised the press for not covering the story until after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump.

“It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth,” Jill Abramson said, adding, “It is simply astounding for the entire country, including its most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of (President Joe) Biden’s debate performance.”

Many consumers of conservative media, however, were quick to point out that they were not shocked. Biden’s missteps — both literal and figurative — have long been recurring features on “Hannity” and other talk shows, to the point where any serious questions raised about the 81-year-old president’s limitations were dismissed as partisan attacks, or deflected by concerns that they would harm the national media’s candidate of choice. “I worry that too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump,” Abramson said.

“Silence,” as Biden has repeatedly said, “is complicity.” And the legacy news media’s silence about Biden’s deteriorating condition in recent years is prompting soul-searching among journalists and a new combativeness between the press and the White House. In one exchange described as “heated” and “tense,” Ed O’Keefe of CBS News pressed White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to share details about reports that a Parkinson’s disease specialist had visited the White House multiple times.

A clearly annoyed Jean-Pierre seemed to reveal in her response just how rarely she is strongly challenged, saying, “please, a little respect here,” and “there’s no reason to go back and forth with me in this aggressive way.”

Actually, there were plenty of reasons, articulated by The Guardian in an article entitled “Warning signs: A history of Joe Biden’s verbal slips” in which the newspaper recounts incidents over the past three years that, in retrospect, should have been cause for greater scrutiny by the press. These range from Biden stumbling three times as he boards a plane, confusing Iraq with Ukraine, and inexplicably ending a speech about gun safety by saying “God save the queen, man.”

And these are just a sampling of worrisome incidents that are undisputed. There have been many others that might be open to interpretation, most recently a moment in last week’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, when Biden appeared to say that he would be satisfied if he had done his “goodest job” in trying to defeat Trump, and a kerfuffle later erupted between the press and the White House over what he actually said.

And of course, Biden provided new sound bites for his critics today when he, among other stumbles, introduced Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” at the NATO meeting in New York City and called Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump” at a rambling news conference that lasted nearly an hour.

Biden did better than many people expected at the news conference, in which he answered questions from pre-selected reporters ranging from Ukraine aid to modifications to his schedule. “He is not going anywhere,” Meghan McCain posted on X. But the performance cannot erase all the calls that have been made for Biden to pull out of the race, nor the sense that the press has helped to put Democrats, and perhaps the nation, in the pickle that they’re in.

There may not have been a nefarious “conspiracy of collusion,” as British commentator Piers Morgan has charged, but there was certainly fear by some in the media of helping Donald Trump. There was also a lack of willingness to ask probing questions when the president faltered, and to do the kind of bootstrap reporting that might reveal, as independent journalist Alex Berenson did on July 6 (two days before The New York Times published its story), a curious series of visits to the White House by a doctor who specializes in Parkinson’s disease.

Much of the reporting that is now coming in a deluge — the friendly interviews that feature the same White House-supplied questions, the light scheduling, the scant number of news conferences Biden has held compared to his predecessors — all could have been written months ago. It’s fair for Americans to question whether Biden’s condition was intentionally concealed not only by the White House, but by journalists, who seemed to have plenty of time to report on every questionable thing that Donald Trump did or said.

In a thoughtful discussion on Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Kicker” podcast, Josh Hersh talked with an Axios reporter who is among a handful of journalists who have been writing stories about Biden’s health, pre-debate. Alex Thompson noted that it’s easy to make pronouncements about the president’s decline when you’re a pundit like Sean Hannity, less so when you’re a reporter who must produce on-the-record sources and other evidence for every paragraph you write. And when you’re writing about a Democrat, those on-the-record sources can’t all be Republicans — which was a flaw in The Wall Street Journal’s June 4 report on Biden’s “signs of slipping,” Thompson said.

It’s one thing to write about Biden’s physical limitations — falling off a bike, or tripping while walking up stairs — but quite another to take on the question of “is he mentally limited?” Thompson said, adding, “You can’t report that someone is in decline or slipping without access to him.” And a protective White House staff has sharply limited the press’ access to Biden — and apparently even his own advisers.

Chuck Todd of NBC News said on his podcast that a “pretty senior” cabinet secretary told him two years ago, “He can’t run again like this.” Todd said that he replied, “Well, you have more interaction with him than I do,” and the cabinet secretary said, “I don’t have a lot of interaction with him.”

Todd added, “It’s the story everybody knows, and that everybody was afraid to talk about.”

Fear, then, might have played an outsized role in reporting on Biden’s condition — fear of a Trump win by a left-leaning press, fear of White House reprisal, and even fear of being wrong. One thing that the public doesn’t understand about journalists is how much we fear getting things wrong. (This played into the media’s unwillingness to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, too.) On “The Kicker” podcast, Thompson talked about looking around nervously when others weren’t reporting the same story he was about Biden — he feared he might be reading Biden’s missteps wrong, and he also feared that his professional peers might see him as “a right-wing hack in mainstream media clothes.”

That said, Thompson was writing about Biden’s decline while many other reporters were writing stories explaining why things that looked like decline actually weren’t. In a thread on X, Drew Holden compiled a list of these headlines, among them: “How misleading videos are trailing Biden as he battles age doubts” in The New York Times and “Cheapfake Biden videos enrapture right-wing media but deeply mislead” in The Washington Post.

It’s hard to overstate how much the media has flipped on the subject of Biden in just 14 days. Jake Tapper, a moderator at the June 27 debate, has spoken out strongly about Biden’s condition, calling his refusal to leave the race “Operation Defiance” and devastatingly reading snippets of Biden’s disjointed answers in recent interviews, which we all know were not “cheapfakes” manipulated for political advantage.

There’s no question that the internet is awash in deceptive images, which makes the media all the more suspicious of them. But there’s also no question that public distrust in the media, which has deepened over the past eight years, is related to the open hostility toward Trump and his supporters among some members of the media. Until the media remembers that its job is not to keep Trump out of office, but “to hold power accountable,” as Abramson said, and to do so without partisan bias, our favorable ratings will remain even lower than Biden’s.