Former President Joe Biden’s alleged age-related drop is both a political scandal and a media another. An appropriately skeptical press would have asked consistently penetrating questions about the oldest president in history and continued to press the issue when it was clear the White House was hiding something ( often, the president himself ). Instead of providing a megaphone to Biden’s supporters in what were supposed to be direct news stories, they frequently did.
If political advisers are always supposed to present the director in the most favorable light they possibly can, though some new Trump details suggest this went well beyond any standard enhance function, the media are not supposed to do anything of the type. Because of this, Biden’s physical and mental health has been subjected to a second evaluation while in office, which has so far failed to convince the people.
The Biden election battle was framed as a defence of democracy against a special danger: his father, and the guy who would become his son, Donald Trump. This all-purpose justification for defending democracy evolved into a series of unjust actions, including avoiding a dynamic Democratic key process in 2024, updating the principal calendar to be beneficial to Biden, expanding the role of Biden aides who were not elected or confirmed by the Senate in governing the nation as he advanced, and then, when all else failed, replacing Biden with a nominee who did not receive a second primary vote and ran unopposed at the party’s Chicago convention.  ,
Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three regional activities despite all these intrigues, apparently in literary justice. But the question remains whether the internet, which had in many cases mishandled reports ranging from Trump-Russia to the 2023-24 lawfare strategies against the previous and future leader, saw themselves as defending democracy against Trump when providing generally kid-glove policy of Biden.
Jake Tapper, a journalist for CNN, probably did not anticipate that his book tour would turn into an apology tour. Yet that is what has happened as his media blitz has quickly given way to mea culpas.  ,
When Tapper and Alex Thompson, a reporter for Axios, joined her influential podcast to discuss the book he coauthored with Alex Thompson, a reporter for Axios, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which was published in May by Penguin Random House, he admitted to Megyn Kelly:” Knowing what I know now, obviously I feel tremendous humility about my coverage.”
” That Lara Trump interview, for example— she saw something that I did not see at the time”, Tapper continued. ” One hundred percent. And I own that”. Tapper is referring to an interview he conducted in 2020 with Lara Trump where he claimed she had ridiculed Biden’s stutter at an event. She replied that she “had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter. I believe that what we see on stage with Jake and Joe Biden is a cognitive decline.
” You are so amazing”, Tapper shot back.” ‘ A cognitive decline. The CNN anchor now says he apologized to Lara Trump “months ago”. He continued,” Ok, I mean, of course, I look back at my coverage with humility. And I wish I had covered the issues of age and acuity— but I wish I had covered them much more”.
Yes, Biden’s family and White House staff were among those who supported him. They took steps to limit the exposure of his infirmities to Beltway elites and the general public. The former president was unyielding, an 82-year-old man who had been campaigning for a job since at least 1987 and asking that voters let him keep it past his 86th birthday.
But it was the task of the press to report facts that would help voters understand whether Biden was up to doing that highly coveted job. There was little interest in covering these stories outside of the conservative media, despite many polls suggesting that voters were still doubting Biden’s fitness to serve. ( In giving him an award for his 2024 coverage of Biden, the White House Correspondents ‘ Association seemingly acknowledged Thompson was a rare exception to the rule. )  ,
The steady stream of new accounts examining Biden’s limitations as president contains revelatory details and interesting color. However, they don’t arrive at conclusions about Biden’s condition that are fundamentally different from those that most voters, including many rank-and-file Democrats, have made on their own from watching him alone. And they put more blame on Democratic politicians and Biden aides than on the media.
Reading the Washington Examiner would have provided information for voters on Biden’s age issue years prior to the flood of books that are only now being published after he left office. ” Whatever their differences, the two front-runners in the Democratic presidential race, Joe Biden, born November 20, 1942, and Bernie Sanders, born September 8, 1941, share one common trait: They are too old to be president”, chief political correspondent Byron York wrote in April 2019.  ,
” And that fact is, Biden, now 77, has clearly slowed down”, York wrote in late July 2020. He doesn’t appear to be as active as he did during his 44 years in office. … At the moment, Biden is facing very little commentary and criticism about his age. When Republican Bob Dole ran for president in 1996 and Republican John McCain, who would have been 72 if he had been elected, ran in 2008, there was more discussion of age. But Biden, who would be 78, attracts less talk”.
In March 2020, Hugo Gurdon, the editor-in-chief, described Biden as an “old man in a new world.” ” The problem with bygone eras, however, is that they are bygone”, he wrote. There is no turning back. Biden is avowedly yesterday’s man, his rhetoric is all about ( dubious ) past achievements”.
In late 2023, almost 190 days before Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, Gurdon wrote that” President Joe Biden’s great age and concomitant physical and mental decline have been the subject of intensifying discussion since Democrats first chose him as their leader.” ” Back then, he was only — only! 77 years old. Now, he is 81, and if he is reelected, he’ll swear his oath of office at the age of 82. At 86, he’ll leave the White House if he can get a second term.
Gurdon added that Biden’s “aides and first lady Jill Biden do their best to manage his schedule and lighten his load. They want to cut down on his obligations so he doesn’t tire himself out, cutting down on opportunities for him to humiliate himself and the rest of us at our president’s choice.
David Freddoso wrote for the Washington Examiner magazine in February 2024 about how some progressive Democrats saw Biden’s deficits as an asset. Their argument was” that Biden does not matter.” He might have the title of president, but it is the young, radical aides from the Obama era who are really running the country in his name”.
Similar inquiries about Biden were made by Megyn Kelly, her former Fox News coworkers, and numerous other conservative media figures. Only intermittently did those inquiries escape from that bubble.
Biden had promised to run as a” transitional” candidate. But in his dotage, the transition may have come early as younger, more progressive staffers tied to Democrats who likely could not have won the 2020 presidential election operated with limited supervision. These aides came to the conclusion that their policy victories justified holding Biden in office, regardless of his condition.  ,
One Biden staffer, according to Original Sin, said,” He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years.” ” He’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while. His assistants could fill the void. Democracy, this is not.
However, many in the media expressed regret over how they covered Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. They thought they paid excessive attention to Trump’s campaign rallies before they took him seriously enough as a candidate. These reporters regretted giving Hillary Clinton’s emails almost as much time, a regret that only grew as Trump was accused of handling sensitive documents himself. They weren’t going to repeat their mistake by doing the same thing with the Biden age issue, which itself was amplified by a classified documents scandal and investigation.  ,
Even so, there were reports about how Biden’s age could have become a political liability even before then-special counsel Robert Hur’s reporting describing the then-president as an elderly man with a bad memory. Could Biden have been pushed out of office by Democrats and their allies in American newsrooms? Noah Rothman asked in National Review during one such wave of coverage in September 2023. A president who wants to remain president is “extremely difficult to remove from office.” But it’s not impossible to imagine a popular groundswell in which the press, backed by supermajorities of Democrats, had successfully applied all its leverage with the aim of convincing Biden to bow out at the end of his first term”.
Rothman believed that the Democrats ‘ and the legacy media’s days were long gone. But this exact scenario unfolded much as he described it in the aftermath of Biden’s dreadful June 27, 2024, debate showing. That’s when the press as a whole turned sharply against Biden because it appeared he was not capable of defeating Trump a second time, without any” conservative” qualifier.
One issue was surely that Democratic sources were then willing to come out of the woodwork to talk about their own experiences with, or lack of unfiltered access to, Biden. Seven days after the debate, Olivia Nuzzi’s New York magazine article was published. There was clearly some reporting in the can.  ,
When the Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes reported in early June 2024 that Biden was” slipping” behind closed doors — one of the White House’s defenses of Biden was how sharp he was in private settings, conveniently outside the cameras ‘ view — many of the on-the-record sources were Republicans. Democrats have publicly refuted the report. After the debate, some Democrats who had participated in this pushback began calling for Biden to reconsider his reelection campaign.  ,
Some outlets undoubtedly preferred to have concerns about Biden’s age and capacity to run or serve come from Democrats rather than let Republicans repeat their familiar criticisms of” Sleepy Joe”. Dems bite Biden, man bites dog, and Dems bite Man. After the debate, more Democrats were willing to go on the record with these complaints, and it’s likely that editors were more comfortable running what was still on background.  ,
” The editors who drove a lot of these coverage decisions will remain quiet and hidden”, Axios reporter Marc Caputo wrote on X. They” will never fess up,” they say. They’ll never look inward. They will permit the reporters to express their disapproval of the choices they made.
But that doesn’t explain the near-uniformity of the coverage decisions, the eagerness to accept the White House’s framing of age and decline stories by people who observed Biden more regularly than concerned voters did, or even confident proclamations that Biden was totally fine. Joe Scarborough, a congressman while Biden was still in the Senate, is the most well-known illustration of the most recent phenomenon.  ,
In March 2024, Scarborough claimed that the then-president’s “best Biden ever” was “more than cogent” in an intellectual and analytical sense. The Morning Joe host finally admitted on May 21 that he was “obviously wrong”. ( Albeit with more restrictions than he included in his original statement. )
In the days leading up to the fateful presidential debate, several top media outlets largely took the White House’s word that videos that appeared to show Biden’s infirmity were deceptively edited” cheap fakes”. According to a fact check from the Washington Post, this footage “enraptured right-wing media” despite the fact that it “deeply misled” the media. The publication also ran the headline” How Republicans used’ cheap fake ‘ videos to attack Biden”. The New York Times drew equivalency between concerns about his age and the accuracy of videos being distributed by Republicans just three days before the debate ended Biden’s campaign.
A week before the debate, NBC News fretted about whether the fact-checkers would be able to stay on top of all the viral videos purporting to show a doddering Biden. The fact check involves taking a stroll on the beach, and the lie is sprinting the 100-meter dash. So it’s never going to catch up. And it won’t ever have the same reach, according to Democratic strategist Eric Schultz, who was quoted by the outlet. Days before that, Schultz disputed a New York Post story about Biden being led off the stage at a Democratic fundraiser by posting on X,” This did not happen”.
Hollywood star George Clooney, however, cited his experiences at the time during the debate in an op-ed calling on Biden to leave the race. Clooney said Biden was no longer the man he knew. In Original Sin, Tapper and Thompson reveal that Biden had forgotten about Clooney at the lavish event. Former President Barack Obama and others were said to be concerned about Biden’s performance.
Evaluations of the Biden footage were left to the beholder’s subjective judgment due to the” cheap fakes” concept rather than the manufactured “deep fakes” concept. One could always quibble about how accurately a video is edited. Some were unfavorably distributed by partisan sources and were widely distributed. Reporters should not take the Republican National Committee’s word for it any more than the White House’s. Even though they were imperfect, these videos managed to convey a more accurate picture than the official Bidenworld spin.
The obviousness of it all is now being used to defend how Biden was covered. In the Atlantic, Mark Leibovich blared,” Why I think the ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s ‘ true condition is beside the point— and why I’m not really vibing with the umbrage-mongering: It’s pretty much impossible to’cover up’ for something that is hiding in plain sight.”
” Democrats could trot out as many White House officials as they wanted to claim I was with the president just this morning, and he was sharp as a tack and running circles around staffers less than half his age“, he continued. However, the public’s already established opinion of Biden’s condition was only reinforced whenever he was allowed to speak publicly, which was a rare event and one that raised red flags.
Journalistic problems with this take aside, Leibovich sang a different tune in 2023. On a PBS roundtable show, he said,” It’s not just making an issue of Biden’s age, it’s lying.” ” It’s saying he’s senile, saying he’s demented, saying he’s out of it”. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, said,” Right. Mentally, he’s quite acute”. Then Leibovich responded,” It seems like it.”
Fast-forward to May 2025, when Leibovich wrote,” Biden was in no position to keep doing his job given his condition, which had been evident for years to most people paying even casual attention”.
Leibovich, however, makes an important point clear, despite the fact that Biden has been speaking in public and on television for decades. He was a two-term vice president who, before that, was a senator for 36 years. On his third election, he was elected president. His diminishment as a communicator, at least, was obvious to anyone covering him. And Biden’s busy public life both suggested that the White House was aware of this decline and that there was, as Tapper and Thompson wrote in their book,” a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function.”
There was nothing former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre or top advisers such as Anita Dunn or$ 4 million man Michael Donilon could say that would alter what voters — or journalists, for that matter — could see and hear for themselves.
How the Biden White House was being run was something the voters couldn’t see, and what is now only being widely reported after the fact. Now, Donilon, former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, top policy adviser Bruce Reed, counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, and Jill and Hunter Biden are being described in Soviet-like terms as a close-knit group called the “politburo”. They made important decisions and limited Biden’s access to the rest of the White House staff. ” Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board”, Tapper and Thompson were told.
How the media handled questions about Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis and his lack of public health while he was still president will be the real test of whether anyone has learned anything. Those questions should be handled sensitively, given the severity of Biden’s condition, but they still need to be asked and answered forthrightly.  ,
So far, it has been a mixed bag: several nuanced interviews with urologists and other medical experts discussing the odds that Biden’s cancer would have appeared so suddenly, but also an at least arguably disproportionate focus on what Trump is saying, almost always “without evidence”, about the matter. Some Democrats have urged that Biden’s recovery be “muted.” But it is still early.  ,
DEMOCRATS SUGGEST A’ PAUSE’ IN BIDEN HEALTH TALK AFTER CANCER DIAGNOSIS ,
Alex and I are here to tell Kelly that the conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just between me and the legacy media, Tapper said.
We’ll see how many others take that lesson.  ,
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.  ,
