The media must admit to covering up Biden’s decline

When it comes to the many forthcoming books about President Joe Biden’s decline, only one question matters: what role did the national news media play in assisting his White House in the cover-up? It’s a question that, if early snippets and sample releases are anything to go by, will remain largely ignored by the authors and their colleagues in media.

A number of reporters are releasing volumes about Biden’s conspicuous cognitive decline, that many of them supposedly only became aware of on the debate stage last June. Many of these journalists actively worked to smear anyone who had noticed the former president’s state of mind, including right-leaning commentators and Republicans, as far back as 2021. But Biden’s cognitive and physical deterioration were not first apparent on the debate stage. They didn’t even start in January of that year, when Axios’s Alex Thompson began to take notice. That would be the same Alex Thompson honored at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner for his reporting. “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 told the 2,500 journalists present. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it.”

But throughout most of his term, any mention of Biden’s age and physical decline was met with attacks by parts of the media, including CNN, the AP, the Washington Post, the New York Times and NBC News. The Biden campaign and White House labeled incidents of him wandering off or losing his train of thought as “cheap-fakes” and the media echoed the same terminology, right up until the moment when the real Joe Biden fully revealed himself on June 27.

The media’s role in deflecting from Biden’s decline started in January 2020. John Hendrickson wrote at the Atlantic, “His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness. Maybe they’d be more understanding if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.” However Biden was not battling a stutter and had said he overcame it as a child.

The “stutter” line would serve as the fallback excuse for almost the entirety of his presidency. Jake Tapper, Thompson’s co-author, attacked then-RNC chairwoman Lara Trump when she said Biden was clearly in a state of cognitive decline. Tapper used the stutter line. Tapper’s entire book appears predicated on the idea that neither he nor any of his colleagues had any idea about Biden’s state until Tapper saw it at the debate he moderated. It’s worth nothing that CNN hired Kate Bedingfeld, the Biden White House communications director, in 2023.

NBC’s Jonathan Allen is currently promoting his book about the 2024 race and the behind-the-scenes scheming to force Biden out of the race. But it was also Allen’s network who said Republicans were floating a “quiet conspiracy” that Biden would not be on the ticket. One of the authors of that piece, Dasha Burns, is now White House bureau chief at Politico. MSNBC’s flagship program Morning Joe boldly declared Biden to be in the best shape of his life, just three weeks prior to calling on him to withdraw. Neither Joe Scarborough nor Mika Brzezinski have offered an explanation or apology as they attempt to distance themselves from the Biden family and advisors.

And what of the famous Biden notecards? Biden would routinely say that he “had been given a list of people to call on” on the rare occasions when he took live questions. Who was participating in these lists? Were correspondents pre-submitting their questions at the behest of the White House? It sure appeared that way, when in April 2023, LA Times reporter Courtney Subramanian’s question appeared on a notecard Biden was holding, with her name, headshot and the question typed out for the president. Subramanian was later promoted to the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association, whose former president Kelly O’Donnell refused to answer if journalists were volunteering their questions for Biden ahead of time, despite evidence suggesting they did so.

This is the only question that matters, as reporters attempt to salvage their credibility, and cash in on books that glaze over their roles in the “cover-up” referenced in the title of Tapper and Thompson’s book. Until journalists volunteer the truth about how, exactly, they worked with the Biden White House, their books should be written off as attempts to cover their asses.