The media turns on Joe Biden — for the moment

Joe Biden is no stranger to ignoring shouted questions from reporters. But his response to the ongoing scandal over his possession of classified documents — first at his think tank and then in his garage next to his beloved 1967 Corvette Stingray — has provoked a rare instance of journalists beyond Fox News’s Peter Doocy demanding answers. It’s a welcome occurrence — and it’s unlikely to last.

Part of this turn against Biden is motivated by the ludicrous nature of his responses. Don’t worry, the commander in chief assures us, the garage is locked. It’s also thanks to the dismissive way the White House reacted to the obvious hypocrisy of Biden having denounced Trump for taking classified documents, which people love to read about and the media loves as an easy frame.

Another aspect is that putting Biden in the hotseat was the pre-programmed media narrative of the post-midterm direction for the Democrats. But the surprising results, the red wave being beaten back, took old Joe from a problem who had to go to someone much harder to displace. As Dana Loesch notes:

Since he’s not decided on 2024 and, bizarrely, no one in his party can definitively state whether they’d endorse his second run, his opposition needs him to bow out, and they’ll leak on him and leave him without surrogate defenders if necessary… Democrats were the ones who knew about the documents and Democrats were the ones who kept it quiet these past six years — and right before last November. Democrats, not Republicans, ultimately leaked this.

Anyone familiar with how media narratives work should expect this critical attitude to be short-lived. Already CNN is out with a four-bylined piece that works as talking points for guests on the Sunday shows: you see, the real reason this document mishap happened was that Joe Biden was just too dedicated to his job. Really, that’s what they’re going with:

The early days of 2017 were a whirlwind for Vice President Joe Biden: swearing in a new Congress, a surprise Medal of Freedom, a speech at Davos and one final trip to Ukraine. Partly to wrap up his policy portfolios, partly to tout his accomplishments, and partly to occupy himself following the death of his son a year earlier, Biden thrust himself into work in a final sprint to mark what then appeared to be the end of a four-decade run at the highest levels of government.

As Biden was busy keeping busy, however, his office was shutting down. Aides scrambled to pack up his workspaces in the West Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and at his official residence, the Naval Observatory. Those competing objectives – to use his office until the final minutes even as it was obliged to shut down – made for a muddled and hurried process that left aides packing boxes of documents and papers late into the night, even as more material kept arriving.

No such CNN justification, of course, was offered for Donald Trump after he was caught with classified materials at Mar-a-Lago. But then what we’re seeing now is the normal way of doing things under a Democrat. When a scandal is uncovered, White House reporters initially react with a natural frustration that they’ve been jerked around by deceptive Democratic staffers who hid the news (until after the midterms, in this case). But once the talking points take hold and the spin reaches the op-ed pages and late-night comics, the attitude softens and things return to normal.

Before you know it, Peter Doocy will be standing alone again, while old Joe tells him to shut up and other reporters look on.