The weekend of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner reopened the debate over how the press corps covered former President Joe Biden’s age-related decline while in office, a story that for many sounded too conservative to be true.
Alex Thompson, a political reporter for Axios who had written extensively about Biden’s 2024 meltdown, received an award from the WHCA for his coverage. He used his acceptance speech to discuss how the media largely failed the public on that particular story.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it.”
He added, “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should have done better.”
At this point, only a minority of political journalists would dissent from these points. Yet they don’t satisfy all the critics of how Biden was covered. This includes the current White House press secretary under President Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt.
Leavitt said she did “agree with that assessment from Alex Thompson,” whom she went on to characterize as having “won an award for writing a story months and perhaps years after the American people already knew that story to be true.”
“Millions of Americans watched our mentally incompetent president struggle with his day-to-day duties of this office,” she continued. “We watched our country be run into the ground as a result, and nobody in the media wanted to write about that or talk about it.”
Whatever your views of this White House’s framing of the Biden age issue, this much is true: most voters, including partisan Democrats, thought the octogenarian president was too old before the June 27, 2024, debate with Trump. An ABC News-Ipsos poll released that February showed an overwhelming majority thought Biden too old to serve another term, including most Democrats.
In March 2024, a New York Times-Siena College poll found that a majority of Biden 2020 voters thought he was too old to be effective. As far back as 2022, before the midterm elections, that pollster concluded 94% of Democrats under 30 wanted their party to nominate someone else for president in the next election.
“When we look at the polls, though, the debate didn’t suddenly thrust Biden’s age into the spotlight for most Americans the way it seemingly did for Democratic Party elites,” wrote FiveThirtyEight’s Kaleigh Rogers in a story published nine days before Biden dropped out. “Though polls of the presidential election have moved toward former President Donald Trump, answers to specific questions about Biden’s age haven’t changed much.”
Many, though not all, reporters who covered Biden daily and saw him regularly were slower to grasp the significance of his aging than voters catching occasional glimpses of him on television or social media. A significant number of stories treated Biden age concerns as right-wing mis- or disinformation, amplifying his team’s talking points on the issue, in some cases just days before the fateful Biden-Trump debate.
Like the COVID-19 lab leak theory, the complaints about Biden’s age and acuity sounded like Republican talking points. And they frequently were so used. Some political reporters felt Republicans overplayed concerns about Biden’s health in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.
But Biden came into the presidency as someone who had been on television for half a century. It was much easier to independently assess how he looked and sounded than it was to the bottom of COVID origins, and it did not require taking selectively edited videos or Alzheimer’s diagnoses by cable news pundits at face value.
Coverage of the 2020 and 2024 campaigns involving Biden was also colored by media regrets over how the 2016 election, which Trump won in an upset, was covered. Some reporters thought Trump benefited from how their industry had handled his first campaign and did not want to repeat those alleged mistakes or make Biden’s age the equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s emails, which liberals thought got excessive attention even outside the conservative press.
The need for access to the Biden White House also surely throttled stories about his age and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Some sources would not cooperate as long as the elder Biden remained politically viable, which is one of the reasons the dam burst so soon after the debate. Finally, there was credulity about assurances that Biden was consistently better in private than he appeared to be in public.
PRESSURE BUILDS ON TRUMP THE DEAL-MAKER TO DELIVER
Sometimes, more than one factor was in play at once. When the Wall Street Journal cast doubt on Biden’s energy behind closed doors, the on-the-record sourcing tilted Republican, and Democrats, including some who would call on Biden to at least consider withdrawing after the debate, publicly pushed back.
Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that a desire to avoid playing into Trump’s hands with coverage that sounded too much like Republican messaging made it difficult for some in the media to believe their own eyes and ears.
