Yes, Media Did Botch the Biden Age Story: An Evaluation of Brian Stelter
Writing in Vox in the wake of Joe Biden’s debate meltdown, Brian Stelter asks the question, “”Did the Media Botch the Biden Age Story?” As someone who has, for years now, been roasting the poor coverage of this very thing, this writer sees the answer to that as rather screamingly obvious. To put it bluntly, the refusal of the corporate press to treat this matter in a responsible manner is a catastrophic and long-running journalistic failure that has been a major contributor to a crisis that presently threatens to upend the republic. Stelter, who admits he’s been doing some soul-searching on how he, himself, handled this in the past, tries to massage the issue — or, if one is feeling less charitable, to muddle it — in such a way that it looks less bad for journalism. His central thesis is somewhat defensible but he’s working overtime to soft-pedal it, which is a rather odd choice considering that the core of his thesis is that the press should have been tougher.
Stelter opens with what feels a lot like some well-poisoning.
“Clueless or complicit.
“That’s Ted Cruz’s take on the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity, which came under scrutiny after the president publicly unraveled in last week’s debate.
“On Monday, the Republican senator from Texas tweeted to me: ‘There are only two options: (1) the Dems & their media shills were so clueless that they had no idea that Biden is mentally incompetent, or (2) they KNEW & they deliberately LIED about it. Both are damning. I vote #2.’”
Cruz is, of course, a partisan hack with a long history of clownish antics and nothing he’s going to say about this is going to be offered in good faith. “Right-wing commentators,” Stelter continues, “are imagining that news outlets covered up Biden’s frailty for years.”
Progressive/left writers, working from a hell of a lot more good faith than Ted Cruz and other rightists, have, for years, been complaining about — and documenting — the corporate press downplaying, papering over, ignoring, treating as a non-story and even, in some cases, actively working to conceal Biden’s cognitive impairment. It’s grossly misleading to try to pass this off as just the dishonest ranting of cranks like Cruz.
Biden is 81 years old. When wading into the matter of Biden’s brain, there are two closely-related but — importantly — separate and distinct concerns, both of which tend (unfortunately) to be expressed, in regular conversation, as”Biden’s age.” The first is the general advisability of such an old man, any such old man, running such a trying office. The second is what really vexes Biden at present and what people tend to mean when they say Biden is “too old,” which is his specific cognitive state, or, more precisely, his demonstrated cognitive impairment. While the first would be an issue with any old man in such a position, the truth is that if Biden spoke like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Rep. Jim Clyburn, both slightly his senior (at, respectively, 82 and 83), his cognitive state wouldn’t even have become an issue for most, certainly not the critical one it is now. People age differently. Some could handle the presidency far better at a given age than others; that’s why merely questioning if Biden is “too old” only muddles the matter (often not, I would argue, unintentionally). In evaluating this, it isn’t someone’s age that necessarily matters; it’s what age has done to him. A news story about the former may mention elements of the latter, but it’s not a news story about the latter. Even by making the title of his piece about whether media botched “the Biden age story,” Stelter is botching — misrepresenting — the real issue.
Stelter sets up his central premise like this:
“But I’m sorry, Ted Cruz, there are more than two options… The national media wasn’t dodging the story: The biggest newspapers in the country published lengthy stories about Biden’s mental fitness. The public wasn’t in the dark about Biden’s age: Most voters (67 percent in a June Gallup poll) thought he was too old to be president even before the debate. But questions about Biden’s fitness for office were not emphasized as much as they should have been.
“That’s the third option: The stories should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder.”
A few things:
1) The public came to understand Biden’s cognitive impairment despite, not because of, the mainstream corporate press treatment — or, more accurately, non-treatment — of the matter.
2) Stelter is fudging the timeline rather badly. Biden’s cognitive decline was immediately apparent in April 2019, when, after a few years out of public life and the public eye, he officially entered the presidential race, and has continued to be a concern ever since, with Biden providing, as a matter of almost-every-time-he-opens-his-mouth routine, new fodder to feed what should have been an ongoing story across the corporate press throughout that time. The 3 newspaper articles Stelter cites are from 9 July, 2022 (the New York Times), 11 Nov., 2022 (the Washington Post) and 4 June, 2024 (the Wall Street Journal). All well into Biden’s presidency, literally years after the fact, and, as the date-spread indicates, these amount to nothing more than a few stray stories. Biden’s cognitive impairment has, in fact, never been treated in a systematic way by the press until after his disastrous debate only days ago with Donald Trump, something this writer has noted — and about which I’ve complained — since 2019. Though all those stories mention elements of Biden’s cognitive decline, only one of the three — the latest — is actually about it.
Stelter’s central premise is correct — the press stories should have been louder and tougher — but, just as importantly, it should have been consistent. In 2019, Biden was a fellow presenting himself as a candidate to become the President of the United States — quite literally, the single most powerful political figure on this planet. When he won the office, that’s what he was, and has remained.
That context is important, because Stelter offers this jawdropper:
“‘The hard thing about “Biden is old” as a story is that it had a dead-end quality to it,’ said Charlotte Alter, senior correspondent for Time magazine. ‘Biden is old. We know. So now what? You can’t turn back time. You can’t make him younger.’”
Few who aren’t impaired by whatever profound perceptual paucity so oppresses Charlotte Alter would need to have explained to them the critical importance of having a President of the United States — the man given such extraordinary power over all of us with so little accountability, the one who answers those much-hyped 3 a.m. emergency phone-calls, the one who commands the most powerful military in the world and a nuclear arsenal that could wipe out all human life on earth — who doesn’t have a broken brain.
Stelter turns to what he calls “a brief history of a half-decade of Biden age-coverage.” The first 2 years of that timeframe — the 2020 campaign cycle — are, by far, the most important, because everything about Biden’s cognitive infirmity that finally led to the past week’s loss-of-fecal-matter freakout by the press and the Dem party poobahs was present then and that was the point at which a different choice could have been made, the point when the refusal of the press to responsibly handle this matter both began and had the most devastating consequences. Stelter — or, at least, his article — doesn’t recognize the importance of this period; he essentially skips over it, offering, as his sole exhibit from it a then-contemporary column in Politico:
“‘Some consider it taboo to ask whether a candidate is too old to serve as president. Not the press,’ Politico’s acclaimed media critic Jack Shafer wrote in 2019. Shafer’s column — titled ‘Is Joe Biden Too Old?’ — observed that nearly every major media outlet was zeroing in on the candidate’s age, then 76, making ‘his state of mental and physical fitness the primary lens through which it views his candidacy.’”
The Schafer column is from 2 Aug., 2019. A few points about it:
Shafer references 7 press outlets that, he says, “ask the ‘too old’ question in recent articles,” but 2 of the 7 were, by then, quite long in the tooth, both predating Biden’s entrance into the presidential race (when his cognitive decline became apparent). One, from the Washington Post, was, by then, nearly a year old. The rest all fell within a few weeks of one another in the Summer of 2019; three of the five were, in fact, written in response to the same bad debate performance by Biden; one of those (by CNN’s Chris Cillizza) was a response to one of the others, from the New York Times. In short, this is just another relative handful of scattered articles. Shafer does say there are more — he writes that “just about every other premium and low-rent outlet you can name has crossed the ageism line to ask the ‘too old’ question” — but, as noted before, there was never any sustained narrative about Biden’s cognitive state by either the mainstream corporate press in general or any mainstream corporate press outlet until his disastrous debate performance on 27 June.
None of the 7 articles Shafer actually cites were about Biden’s cognitive decline. Shafer writes:
“[J]ournalists tend to retreat from calling Biden too infirm to run the White House. The greater press taboo, it seems, isn’t asking the question about Biden but answering it.”
“The press corps’ refusal to resolve the question,” he continues, “has made Biden’s age and his state of mental and physical fitness the primary lens through which it views his candidacy.” That was, to be clear, never “the primary lens” through which the press viewed Biden’s candidacy — at least insofar as anyone can tell by the way it presented that candidacy — but in the earliest months of the campaign the press was more willing to ask questions about it. But this was, in any event, Shafer’s offhand opinion of some stories he’d seen, not, despite his inappropriately expansive wording, something he even pretended was based on any broad canvass of press coverage. Moreover, Shafer, while grossly overstating the amount of skepticism over Biden’s age by the press, was also presenting a false dichotomy; it isn’t the job of the press to straight-up declare Biden is too brain-waxed for the presidency — journalists, as Stelter reminds, aren’t doctors — but to get back to Stelter’s central premise, a responsible press would have questioned this much more strongly, the volume would have been much louder and the coverage would have been much more consistent.
Something else Shafer wrote is worth some attention here:
“Other politicians of a certain age would be punished by voters and the press if they were as consistently loopy as Biden. But his career-long reputation of gaffeing in public indemnifies him from the charges that he has just now gone addle-pated.”
And he notes some of the incredibly stupid things Biden has said and done in the past. During the 2020 cycle, this writer acknowledged that “Biden, even back when he was firing on all cylinders, was both an imbecile and an inveterate liar” who was both chronically dishonest and “in the habit of regularly saying mindnumbingly stupid things.” Between these and his obvious cognitive impairment, “it’s [sometimes] hard to know which of these dynamics are in play or to what extent.”
But in the context of that campaign — and this is why Shafer’s effort at an explanation isn’t a serious defense of the press — that doesn’t really even matter.
When, on 25 April, 2019, Biden entered the race for the Democratic nomination, he was an astonishingly diminished figure. The confident, clear-eyed fellow who, only a few years earlier, had chopped up Paul Ryan for dog-food in their Vice Presidential debate had been reduced to a cadaverous, sputtering, glassy-eyed shell of his former self. I wrote a long article about Biden, which appeared only 9 days after Shafer’s piece. It was about Biden’s career, not specifically his cognitive state, but it did refer to “his dramatic cognitive decline” and described the tone of it, noting that Biden, in the two Democratic debates up until then, was “a real mess — confused, forgetful, stumbling over words and slurring them like a drunk, displaying lots of arrogance and bluster but no command of basic facts, including those regarding ‘his’ proposals, which are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else…” In a later article, I noted that
“At his worst — which, disturbingly, is where one finds him as often as not — [Biden] can barely form coherent words, can barely marshal the words he can manage into coherent sentences and doesn’t even seem to know where he is; he can talk for minutes at a time without it being at all clear what he’s trying to say or what he’s even talking about… When speaking without a strict script, Biden veers from unfocused, inarticulate, contradictory and chronically dishonest to outright bizarre, ludicrous and almost entirely incomprehensible.”
Biden’s cognitive decline was obvious, undeniable. In such circumstances, anything Biden said or did that even hinted of impairment should have gotten a great deal of attention and sustained scrutiny.
At the same time, Biden was presenting himself, during the Democratic primary race, as the “electable candidate.” Polling made clear that Democratic voters were prioritizing the removal of Trump from the White House; Biden’s central theme was that he was the one who could accomplish that. This was directly reflected by the press throughout that campaign. A typical press “assessment,” this one offered by CNN (on 12 June, 2019):
“It’s clear that the President is focused on Biden because the former veep represents the most formidable threat to Trump’s re-election chances.”
Margaret Sullivan, in a Washington Post article (16 June, 2019) critical of the trend, wrote,
“It’s common across the national media to see Biden pegged as the safest candidate for Democrats to put up to unseat Trump. He’s got that secret sauce: electability.”
Summing up that year’s primary contest in its aftermath, I wrote:
“A very long-running theme in political coverage is that ‘moderate’ = ‘electable,’ with ‘moderate’ defined as well to the right of both the Democratic base and the general public. Democrats are goaded into supporting candidates of that species, which are presented as the serious, pragmatic option, as opposed to those rigid, inflexible pie-in-the-sky lefties. When the candidate wins, it’s chalked up to his ‘moderation.’ When the candidate fails, it’s said to be because he was Too Liberal, and the advised solution is always the same: move (even further) right. In much of the corporate press, all of this is treated as Conventional Wisdom. Those with a little grey in the hair and who follow public affairs have heard it in an infinity of variations for decades. Progressive press critic Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, founded in 1986, has documented it for the length of the org’s existence.
“In the current cycle, Joe Biden and the other Clintonite-right candidates plugged into this long-running narrative, arguing that they were more ‘electable’ than [progressive contender Bernie] Sanders. Biden, in fact, made this the major selling-point of his campaign. That’s fair enough — it is a presidential race, after all, and candidates are going to try to make the case that they’re the best choice — but by continuing to perpetuate this narrative and refusing to interrogate it, corporate press outlets were acting as a de facto arm of these campaigns. This was particularly the case with the Biden campaign, as the press was, in that case, directly promoting its central theme at every opportunity but giving it a sheen of greater respectability than it may have had coming from the campaign itself (where it could be seen as self-serving). Many journalists have enthusiastically embraced this role.”
If a candidate is elderly and in cognitive decline, a dimwit and a chronic liar, all of these, by any reasonable estimation, directly reflect on his claims of “electability,” but the press embraced and amplified, to the nth degree, Biden’s “electability” claims and — because doing that required it — largely pushed aside all of the other.
Contra:Shafer, Bidens’ history of saying stupid things shouldn’t have indemnified him in the eyes of the press for the brain-benders he was constantly spouting on the campaign trail. In the context of that campaign, Biden was displaying every sign of significant cognitive decline while claiming to be the “electable” candidate; that should have invited the highest degree of scrutiny.
It didn’t.[1] As I covered at the time, this is how the same mainstream corporate press that was simultaneously portraying Biden as Mr. Electability was handling Biden’s cognitive issues and endless stream of mind-melters:
“The corporate press has reacted to all of this in a few ways. The first and most common is to simply ignore it. Biden says these things and most of them either aren’t covered at all or receive so little coverage they may as well not have even been mentioned. The next is occasionally covering them but presenting them as merely ‘gaffes,’ like some perhaps charming personality quirk, rather than a sign of a serious problem. Still another, a subset of that last, is going ‘horserace’ on this, presenting Biden ‘gaffes’ as something that is only of concern in that it could potentially hinder Biden’s efforts to defeat Trump. Sometimes, press figures concede there may be a problem but, in the end, make nothing of it — the thought just comes, goes and is gone. Perhaps the most disturbing press reaction has involved attacking those who raise questions about Biden’s cognitive abilities. That isn’t just covering for Biden; that’s actively trying to suppress discussion of the matter. This isn’t a story of anecdotes about Biden fumbles though; there’s an ongoing narrative in this, Biden’s apparently significant cognitive decline. That would be a major recurring theme in any responsible press coverage of Biden’s campaign, the thing that, if treated seriously, would overwhelm everything else. Something on which Democrats, Republicans, third-party supporters, liberals conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, even people completely indifferent to politics — everyone — can agree is that ‘President of the United States’ isn’t a job for a congenitally dishonest half-wit with a broken brain. Yet that ongoing narrative, looking at this as a serious matter, is completely absent from the corporate press. It hasn’t appeared in a single major outlet.”
…and didn’t appear in any of them until Biden blew that big debate with Trump a few days ago. Biden’s cognitive impairment meant, among other things, he turned in horrendous debate performances during the Democratic primaries, which were somewhat diluted by the large number of candidates and the debate formats. One, in particular, has long stuck in my mind, as it was so overwhelmingly bad it would have instantly ended the campaign of any prior candidate in any prior campaign, but Biden turned it in only to have the press widely declare him the debate winner. In that one, Biden, among other things, attempted to describe “his” healthcare plan. “[T]he option I’m proposing is Medicare For All” — actually, that’s the progressive plan that Biden had forcefully opposed throughout the campaign — before catching and correcting himself and retreating to “Medicare For Choice.” Of it, he said:
“If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance — from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. You don’t have — no pre-existing condition can stop you from buying in. You get covered, period.”
Minutes later, rival candidate Julian Castro contrasted his own plan favorably to Biden’s by noting that his doesn’t require a buy-in, at which point the former Vice President insisted the Biden plan, contrary to his own clear words only minutes earlier, didn’t require a buy-in either. It led to a testy exchange in which Castro challenged, “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” For this allusion to Biden’s impaired state, Castro was pummeled for days by the press. The dedicated fact-checking units noted that the plan Biden’s campaign had released didn’t require a buy-in but instead of knocking Biden for misdescribing it (and considering the implications of that), they slammed Castro for lying about it — as if a rival candidate was supposed to understand “Biden’s” plan better than Biden and in the face of Biden’s clear (and inaccurate) description of it.[2] The message about Biden’s cognitive impairment in that kind of media gangsterism was clear: Don’t even touch it — or else.
I could go on about this at great length — the behavior of the press around this was as appalling as anything since the Iraq War — but I went on about it like that back then. I’ve linked to some of it as I’ve gone along. I guess I’d also throw in this piece about the press role, more generally, in the portion of the primary process when voting was ongoing.
As that article suggests, the mismanagement of this issue was only part of a much larger pattern of press outlets alternately covering for Biden and otherwise promoting his primary campaign. Along with his cognitive impairment, Biden’s long and horrendous legislative history, which would have probably sunk him with Democratic voters, was largely swept under the rug. When Biden’s major rival Bernie Sanders accurately noted Biden’s long history of trying to engineer cuts to Social Security, much of the press and the fact-checkers gave Sanders the Castro treatment, attacking him and covering for Biden (when the Sanders campaign produced raw videos supporting its contention, Biden falsely said the videos had been “doctored” and cited the mangled “fact-checks,” which had never made any such claim, to back this). In a Jan. 2020 article, media critic Dan Froomkin provided copious examples of how mainstream journalists “have been remarkably gentle with Joe Biden.” When a former Biden staffer accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in the ’90s, no major newspaper even mentioned the allegation for weeks; only after Sanders dropped out of the Democratic race did the New York Times and Washington Post run reports on it — dismissing it entirely; it was over a month before Biden was asked a single question about it. Even putting aside the questionable nature of those allegations, that’s service!
Had the press treated Biden’s cognitive impairment — or any number of other issues — in a responsible manner, Biden never would have become the 2020 Democratic nominee.
Springboarding off Shafer’s column to pretend there was any real scrutiny of Biden during that campaign, Stelter continues:
“The scrutiny never really subsided. The New York Times’s chief White House correspondent Peter Baker told me that his first Page One story about Biden’s age was published in July 2022. ‘The age question is catching up to Joe Biden,’ a CNN columnist wrote that same month. ‘Biden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection,’ the Washington Post wrote in November 2022.”
Another scatter of stories that only get written over 3 years after they should have become a daily feature of Biden coverage.
“Still, despite the scrutiny, some reporters are looking back and wondering what they could have done differently, particularly after Biden’s April 2023 announcement of his reelection bid raised the stakes. ‘That’s when the coverage should have gotten a lot tougher,’ one of the beat reporters remarked to me.”
There’s a logic to that contention but there’s a lot more to this one: appropriate ongoing scrutiny of this matter in the many years that preceded that would have likely discouraged Biden from making the very damaging decision to seek reelection in the first place.
In pointing out some obvious facts, Stelter is still trying to massage the matter:
“Biden’s fitness for office merited more ‘obsessing.’ His relative lack of in-depth interviews and news conferences was, in hindsight, a tell. His decision to turn down a prime spot on CBS on Super Bowl Sunday, bucking with presidential tradition, probably should have been scrutinized even more emphatically.”
Biden, in fact, skipped the traditional Super Bowl interview — a softball interview with tens of millions of viewers built in — two years in a row. More broadly, even Trump, who openly described the free press as the “enemy of the people,” did far more interviews than has Biden:
“During his first three years as president, Biden has given 89 interviews, compared to Trump’s 300, Obama’s 422, George W. Bush’s 135, Bill Clinton’s and George H.W. Bush’s 168 each, and Ronald Reagan’s 189 by the same point in their presidencies, according to the White House Transition Project’s Martha Joynt Kumar.
“By late May 2022, Biden had gone 100 consecutive days without a sit-down media interview.”
As of 30 June, Biden has participated in only 36 press conferences. Of the 7 most recent presidents, only Ronald Reagan (at 25) did fewer. In solo “press conferences” Biden tends not to even take questions, just reads a prepared statement and leaves.[3]
It didn’t take any “hindsight” to recognize this as a problem though. This is exactly what happened during the 2020 campaign. Back then, I noted:
“Interacting with his public is Trump’s meth. Biden, on the other hand, has experienced what appears to be significant cognitive decline and his handlers, recognizing that greater exposure would make this more obvious and could sink his candidacy, have mostly kept him out of sight during the campaign… In August, after a string of mind-melting comments led to some mild questioning of Biden’s cognitive state, his supporters argued for making him even less visible, which was done.”
During the general election “campaign,” the covid pandemic put a stop to traditional campaigning, saving Biden’s campaign in the process. Biden was interacting with the press only via occasional video feeds from his own basement — a tightly-controlled environment in which he was free to “respond” to questions by reading, from cards, statements prepared for him by underlings (even in that environment, his cognitive impairment was obvious).
Stelter writes that “it helps to understand what made [this] such a difficult story to begin with,” but gets off on exactly the wrong foot, describing how the Biden White House “waged war on age reporting.”
“In conversations about this topic with a dozen White House correspondents and other Washington reporters, I heard harsh criticism of the Biden administration for ‘gaslighting’ and ‘bullying’ people who pursued stories about the president’s health — and praise for the journalists who did so anyway.
“‘They really hate us over these stories,’ Baker said. The administration’s ‘pushback is pretty strong and their resentment of the coverage is pretty deep, to the point that they’ve complained to our editors.’
“Biden’s press aides were inordinately sensitive, you might say defensive, about the topic. ‘When reporters raise age questions, they lose their minds,’ one reporter said. ‘They go ballistic,’ a second reporter said. ‘Every time you write about Biden’s age, they gaslight you and tell you that you’ll be responsible for the downfall of the American republic,’ a third reporter said, exaggerating just a touch.”
And Stelter describes the furious pushback from the White House on that June Wall Street Journal article that questioned Biden’s cognitive condition. But this isn’t an excuse for failing to do the story; this indicates administration opacity, and should lead good journalists to dig in even harder.[4]
The same is true regarding Stelter’s next section, which argues that “the evidence on Biden’s cognitive decline was often muddled.” He mentions a New York Times story that there are “two Joe Bidens.”
“The notion of Biden having good days and bad days has become conventional wisdom. Perhaps the debate was his worst day yet — although reporters don’t have enough access to Biden to confidently say so… If Biden had a ‘bad day’ with Hur, he also had lots of ‘good days,’ and members of the media dutifully described those, in quotes that have come under newfound scrutiny.”
The evidence of Biden’s “bad days” would, if stacked, blot out the sun — that’s the Biden we’ve so often seen for years now — whereas the notion that Biden has “good days” heavily relies on dubious claims by his friends, underlings, Dem partisans about how he is behind closed doors. Post-debate reporting of that same genre suggests every day is a good and bad one for Biden; Axios spoke with 8 current and former Biden administration officials, who said that
“From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours. Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.”
Even this — considering the sources — could well be an overstatement of Biden’s capabilities (and an effort at damage-control). The problem it identifies was — like all the rest — apparent back in the 2020 Democratic primaries, when the Hill (in a story linked above) reported that “Biden has a tendency to make the blunders late in the day, his allies say,” said allies advising further limiting his visibility to limit the damage from this.
In no way do the claims of parties with an interest in not being straight about this “muddle” the evidence of Biden’s cognitive impairment. If Biden has “bad days,” or if every day is a “good” and “bad” day, he has no business being President of the United States. The mechanics of government grind ever onward, and problems in the U.S. and around the world happen when they happen and don’t wait until a “good day” — or a good timeframe for an addled chief executive — comes along.
“So,” asks Stelter, “did the media get this one wrong?”
“I know many readers would love an easy answer here, and I know many pundits are eager to provide one. But it’s just not that simple.”
This is an issue that needed to be handled with some sensitivity, responsibility and care for nuance, but every issue needs to be handled in that way, and with those caveats, yes, this one is pretty simple. One needn’t be a doctor to recognize that something was very wrong with Biden. That’s why, despite years of non-reporting and misreporting by the press, most people don’t believe his mind is healthy enough to be president.
Stelter turns to right-wing media, which has been having a field-day with Biden’s debate performance:
“Fox News stars have been taking a victory lap this week, having spent years and countless segments portraying Biden as incompetent and incapacitated. They feel like they deserve credit for being early to the story that’s now consuming Washington.
“But Fox supplied precious little actual reporting on the subject of Biden’s health. Instead, hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham queued up video clips of Biden looking helpless and played those clips on a loop, devoid of any context or balance.”
And, I would add (as does Stelter himself) that a lot of what Fox’s headliners have offered on this has just been misinformation. That’s the problem with contemporary right-wing media; there isn’t even an effort at quality-control. Fox’s product is an endless stream of garbage intended to be ideologically satisfying to its audience and those behind it don’t even care if what they’re saying is true (and because of the ideological proclivities of that audience, most of it isn’t).
Even given all of this though, Biden’s mental malfunctions are a real problem and have, over the years, provided Fox with a cornucopia of legitimately damaging clips, which the Fox gang is more than happy to pass around. When an outlet that has earned such a contemptible reputation is pushing the “Biden’s brain” story so hard and for so long, it can’t help but bring that story, which is a real story with major implications for Americans and the world, into disrepute by mere association. Stelter even notes an example of it, saying it “caused at least a little bit of hesitation among good-faith reporters. As one said to me, “I didn’t want to feed into a bad-faith caricature.”
But that’s another argument for responsible reporting, to get — and keep — a very important story straight while a media juggernaut like Fox is just spewing whatever anti-Democratic bullshit comes across the desk that day. When Fox is showing these things to viewers but other outlets aren’t, and aren’t telling the story at all and — worst of all — are, instead, regularly gaslighting their audiences about Biden’s mental acuity,[5] Fox is, by default, getting the story closer to the truth than those outlets. Stelter sees the journalistic responsibility:
“But the answer to bad-faith attacks can’t be a supine press, and journalists have a chance now to prove they’re up to the task of reporting this story. The public deserves to know more about Biden’s health, and it is owed more insight into how the president is functioning in the White House.”
And, since Stelter is still trying to massage — or, if, one prefers, muddle — this, I’ll add the public has deserved — and should have been getting — that all along. It’s very late in the game now. Maybe too late.
— j.
— -
[1] …which, among other things, just reinforces the fact that those “electability” claims is nothing more than a weaponized narrative to be used against progressives, neither based on nor ever consulting any of the actual data on the question of electability (because that data refutes it).
[2] Castro himself was bullied into backing off, later denying he’d ever questioned Biden’s cognitive abilities.
[3] In May, Biden told reporters he would be “holding a major press conference this afternoon.” As so often happens, his underlings had to correct this; it turned out Biden was only doing an MSNBC interview. CNN wrote this up but — as usual — made no connection to Biden’s age or cognitive state.
[4] Stelter also describes the “punishing” pushback such stories get from partisans among news consumers, but in journalism, that just comes with the job.
[5] Stelter insists on extending the benefit of a doubt to some journalists, like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (a Biden friend), who have talked up Biden’s mental acuity, but that’s just too contrary to the many years of evidence to be taken seriously. Maybe some of them are just reporting what they observe (in the controlled circumstances in which they interact with Biden), but if they’re trying to counter the widespread perception that Biden is impaired, they’re not treating the issue responsibly or with any sort of balance — ignoring everything else we’ve observed from Biden and essentially telling us not to believe our own lying eyes and ears.
