{"id":266198,"date":"2024-07-08T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-07-08T11:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=266198"},"modified":"2024-07-06T05:40:41","modified_gmt":"2024-07-06T04:40:41","slug":"did-the-media-botch-the-biden-age-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/07\/did-the-media-botch-the-biden-age-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the Media Botch the Biden Age Story?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

US President Joe Biden. Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Asleep at the wheel? Complicit in a cover-up? The real story is far more complicated \u2014 and more interesting.<\/em><\/p>\n

******<\/strong><\/p>\n

[<\/strong>Rebuttal from Matt Taibbi<\/a>: It\u2019s not complicated, and this think piece is by itself an insult. Audiences know the answer: Yes. You\u2019ve been screwing up for five years. Also, it isn\u2019t a \u201cBiden age<\/em>\u201d story, but a \u201cBiden dementia<\/em>\u201d story. There are octogenarians who are competent to be president. Biden isn\u2019t one. Audiences have known this since 2019, and the only people you\u2019re impressing by saying otherwise are other media nitwits. A flood of these Stelter-style \u201cWhither us?\u201d features asking \u201cif<\/a><\/em> the press missed<\/a>\u201d the Biden-incapacity story has arrived, and I feel like screaming: YOU ARE ONLY TALKING TO EACH OTHER. Even as Biden on a minute-to-minute basis babbles about things like being the first black female president<\/a>, officially reducing him to 1977-Elvis levels<\/a> of incoherence, the excuses keep coming.]<\/strong><\/p>\n

******<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

3 Jul 2024 <\/em>– Clueless or complicit.<\/p>\n

\n

That\u2019s Ted Cruz\u2019s take on the media\u2019s coverage of Joe Biden\u2019s age and mental acuity, which came under scrutiny after the president publicly unraveled in last week\u2019s debate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

On Monday [1 Jul], the Republican senator from Texas tweeted to me<\/a>: \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Cruz isn\u2019t the only one taking aim at the media after the debate.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Right-wing commentators are imagining that news outlets covered up Biden\u2019s frailty for years. Some on the left are asserting that the White House press corps should have probed Biden\u2019s health more closely, which could have prompted a fuller primary process. Journalists (including the one writing this column) are doing some reassessing of their own, asking if the clearly aging 81-year-old president was given the benefit of the doubt too many times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But I\u2019m sorry, Ted Cruz, there are more than two options.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

And after talking to top reporters on the White House beat, what emerges is a far more nuanced picture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The national media wasn\u2019t dodging the story: The biggest newspapers in the country published<\/a> lengthy<\/a> stories<\/a> about Biden\u2019s mental fitness. The public wasn\u2019t in the dark about Biden\u2019s age: Most voters (67 percent in a June Gallup poll<\/a>) thought he was too old to be president even before the debate. But questions about Biden\u2019s fitness for office were not emphasized as much as they should have been.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

That\u2019s the third option: The stories should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThe hard thing about \u2018Biden is old\u2019 as a story is that it had a dead-end quality to it,\u201d said Charlotte Alter, senior correspondent for Time magazine. \u201cBiden is old. We know. So now what? You can\u2019t turn back time. You can\u2019t make him younger.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But the story is no longer a dead end. Key members of Biden\u2019s party, spooked by the debate, are wondering whether he should remain in the race. Some are pushing for him to step aside. One of the correspondents I interviewed, who spoke on condition of anonymity because their employer prohibits outside interviews, said, \u201cSources are coming out of the woodwork now.\u201d Journalists who were previously stymied by uncooperative aides are now probing whether the White House did, to some degree, cover up Biden\u2019s condition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Until now, the coverage has largely consisted of questions; hopefully soon there will be answers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

A brief history of a half-decade of Biden age coverage<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cSome consider it taboo to ask whether a candidate is too old to serve as president. Not the press,\u201d Politico\u2019s acclaimed media critic Jack Shafer wrote in 2019. Shafer\u2019s column<\/a> \u2014 titled \u201cIs Joe Biden Too Old?\u201d \u2014 observed that nearly every major media outlet was zeroing in on the candidate\u2019s age, then 76, making \u201chis state of mental and physical fitness the primary lens through which it views his candidacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The scrutiny never really subsided. The New York Times\u2019s chief White House correspondent Peter Baker told me that his first Page One story<\/a> about Biden\u2019s age was published in July 2022. \u201cThe age question is catching up to Joe Biden,\u201d a CNN columnist wrote<\/a> that same month. \u201cBiden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection,\u201d the Washington Post wrote<\/a> in November 2022.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This was critical coverage. Journalists aren\u2019t doctors, and shouldn\u2019t pretend to be. But they are observers, and Baker, like others on the Biden beat, reported what he observed over the years. Biden \u201coften shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire,\u201d Baker wrote in 2022. \u201cHe stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Back then, it was unclear whether Biden would run for a second term. Baker quoted S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago, saying it was fair to ask if Biden would still be fit for office in 2028, when he would be 86 years old. \u201cYou can\u2019t sugarcoat aging,\u201d Olshansky said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Still, despite the scrutiny, some reporters are looking back and wondering what they could have done differently, particularly after Biden\u2019s April 2023 announcement of his reelection bid raised the stakes. \u201cThat\u2019s when the coverage should have gotten a lot tougher,\u201d one of the beat reporters remarked to me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

The White House waged war on age reporting<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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To assess the quality of the media\u2019s coverage of Biden\u2019s age, it helps to understand what made it such a difficult story to begin with. Because it certainly is difficult.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt has been a challenge for the media to find the best way to tell this story,\u201d Baker said. \u201cIt\u2019s a hard topic, right? It\u2019s subjective. It depends in part on people in the room with him telling you in a candid way what they see. And it\u2019s certainly true that this White House is not a particularly transparent White House.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Baker\u2019s sentiment on the White House is widely shared. In conversations about this topic with a dozen White House correspondents and other Washington reporters, I heard harsh criticism of the Biden administration for \u201cgaslighting\u201d and \u201cbullying\u201d people who pursued stories about the president\u2019s health \u2014 and praise for the journalists who did so anyway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThey really hate us over these stories,\u201d Baker said. The administration\u2019s \u201cpushback is pretty strong and their resentment of the coverage is pretty deep, to the point that they\u2019ve complained to our editors.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Biden\u2019s press aides were inordinately sensitive, you might say defensive, about the topic. \u201cWhen reporters raise age questions, they lose their minds,\u201d one reporter said. \u201cThey go ballistic,\u201d a second reporter said. \u201cEvery time you write about Biden\u2019s age, they gaslight you and tell you that you\u2019ll be responsible for the downfall of the American republic,\u201d a third reporter said, exaggerating just a touch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Atlantic\u2019s Mark Leibovich penned a column<\/a> in June 2022 saying that Biden was \u201ctoo old for the next election.\u201d In a February 2023 follow-up<\/a>, he quipped that \u201cthe White House did not like that story.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Some left-leaning readers didn\u2019t like it, either.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reader response to age coverage was punishing<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In my talks with reporters, I also heard complaints about how stories on Biden\u2019s age were received. Many Trump supporters treated it as a given that Biden was senile, and any report that didn\u2019t outright agree was seen as part of the alleged media cover-up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Meanwhile, Biden supporters accused journalists of abetting Trump by \u201cboth-sidesing\u201d an election that features an aspiring authoritarian who tried to steal the last presidential election.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Prominent journalists who were outspoken about voters\u2019 age concerns, like New York Times podcasters Ezra Klein and Astead Herndon, were pummeled by partisans in social media comment threads. (\u201cAmericans have said consistently that they wanted someone else to be the nominee,\u201d Herndon pointed out again on CNN after the debate last week<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The tensions are still palpable this week: Every time I appear on CNN (my old home) or the BBC to discuss the Democratic Party\u2019s post-debate state of crisis, I get messages from liberal viewers who believe I\u2019m helping hand the election to Trump. The former president looms over every story and TV segment about Biden, and some Washington reporters have privately griped that Biden got a bit of a free pass because Trump was so aberrant and so dishonest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But the White House reporters I know weren\u2019t slacking off or going soft on Biden because they wanted to help the Democratic Party defeat Trump. That\u2019s just Infowars-style conspiracy thinking. Reporters live for scoops, and a scoop about Biden being debilitated would be a blockbuster. It\u2019s just not that simple.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Witness the Wall Street Journal\u2019s prescient story<\/a> in early June \u2014 \u201cBehind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping\u201d \u2014 which was widely criticized for leaning too heavily on Republican sources with partisan agendas. The Biden press shop went into attack mode<\/a> and the Journal reporters felt rather lonely as media commentators derided<\/a> the story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The reality was that the Journal had lots of solid reporting, but too many people gave the Biden White House the benefit of the doubt. I was part of the problem; I appeared on MSNBC and said that Biden\u2019s age could decide the election \u201cif the media obsesses over it and ignores Trump\u2019s faults.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Biden\u2019s fitness for office merited more \u201cobsessing.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

The evidence on Biden\u2019s cognitive decline was often muddled<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

The awkward reality is that there are \u201ctwo Joe Bidens,\u201d as Baker and several New York Times colleagues put it in a Page One piece<\/a> about \u201cAmerica\u2019s oldest president\u201d in June 2023.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

To borrow a meme, that article has aged well. The notion of Biden having good days and bad days has become conventional wisdom. Perhaps the debate was his worst day yet \u2014 although reporters don\u2019t have enough access to Biden to confidently say so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThat was the worst I\u2019ve ever seen him,\u201d one White House correspondent told me afterward, a sentiment affirmed by three other Biden beat reporters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

On the other hand, down-the-middle media outlets may not have placed enough significance on the string of embarrassing video clips and other episodes. Several reporters told me that, in retrospect, apparent signs of Biden\u2019s advancing age were treated as one-offs when they might have been something more. \u201cDid we miss some chances to connect some dots? I think that\u2019s a fair question,\u201d a veteran correspondent told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

On one memorable occasion, in September 2022, Biden scanned a crowd and looked for Rep. Jackie Walorski, Republican of Indiana, asking<\/a>, \u201cJackie, are you here? Where\u2019s Jackie?\u201d Walorski had been killed in a car crash the previous month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

One \u201csenior moment\u201d after another led to frequent corrections of White House transcripts and thorough fact-checks by news outlets. I was particularly galled when Biden said, in remarks to service members and first responders on the anniversary of September 11, that he remembered \u201cstanding there the next day\u201d and looking at Ground Zero. He didn\u2019t visit<\/a> the site until nine days after the attack. I wish I had made more of that. At the time, I chalked it up to Biden being Biden.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

That\u2019s also how the White House tried to minimize special counsel Robert K. Hur\u2019s embarrassing assessment<\/a> of Biden as a \u201csympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.\u201d When Biden delivered an angry rebuttal to Hur\u2019s report, he mixed up<\/a> the presidents of Egypt and Mexico \u2014 yet another one of those dots that could have been connected more assertively. Several beat reporters told me they thought the White House largely succeeded in framing Hur as a Republican smear artist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

If Biden had a \u201cbad day\u201d with Hur, he also had lots of \u201cgood days,\u201d and members of the media dutifully described those, in quotes that have come under newfound scrutiny. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a personal friend of Biden\u2019s, said in March that he\u2019d recently \u201cspent a couple of hours with Joe Biden\u201d and found him to be \u201cbetter than he\u2019s ever been intellectually.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Anti-Biden media outlets have ridiculed Scarborough for praising Biden\u2019s intellect, but the assessment is entirely in line with the experience many people have with elderly relatives: sharp one day, slow the next day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Similarly, Biden biographer Evan Osnos wrote<\/a> in the New Yorker that when he last interviewed Biden, in January, \u201chis mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Immediately after the debate, Osnos said Biden was clearly diminished. He told me, of the article he published in March, \u201cThe piece was about Biden\u2019s defiant belief that he could and should win. His job was to persuade Americans to agree with him, and that has failed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Until the debate, Biden\u2019s highest-profile television appearance of the year was his State of the Union address in March. He won high marks for a commanding, even feisty speech; he was so high-energy that Fox types claimed he was \u201cjacked up\u201d on stimulants or illicit substances. But he was using a teleprompter and speaking in front of a crowd, two features that last week\u2019s CNN debate lacked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The triumphant nature of Biden\u2019s State of the Union address enabled White House aides, and Biden-friendly media outlets, to dismiss his mental misfires and physical deterioration. For a long time, \u201cthey did an incredibly effective job of bubble wrapping him,\u201d a DC anchor told me. It worked, sometimes, with some audiences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s not working anymore. The bubble wrap is off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So did the media get this one wrong?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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I know many readers would love an easy answer here, and I know many pundits are eager to provide one. But it\u2019s just not that simple.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For starters, there\u2019s no such thing as \u201cthe media\u201d anymore. We live in a time of such complete and utter mass-media fragmentation that we each live in a media bubble of our own making. In mine, Biden might be a wise leader who is making America sane again after four years of Trump insanity; in yours, he might be a doddering old fool or a victim of \u201celder abuse,\u201d as Fox hosts are now openly saying.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

And even if you narrow the media-criticism conversation down to a handful of high-profile, down-the-middle national outlets, the record of how effectively Biden\u2019s health was covered is complicated, just as aging is a complicated process. Baker, who co-bylined a new story<\/a> on Tuesday titled \u201cBiden\u2019s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome,\u201d told me, \u201cIt\u2019s very likely that things have progressed in recent weeks and months that make this a more acute story now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Throughout Biden\u2019s years in office, reporters sought to avoid ageist stereotypes and respect the fact that Biden has a history of stuttering while also reporting on what they were observing. They also weighed his verbal gaffes and viral video blunders against his political victories. Baker and several other reporters wrote in the June 2023 \u201cAmerica\u2019s Oldest President\u201d story that Biden was, in truth, \u201csomewhere between the partisan cartoon of an addled and easily manipulated fogy promoted by Republicans and the image spread by his staff of a president in aviator shades commanding the world stage and governing with vigor.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, about those Republicans. 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\u2019s now consuming Washington.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But Fox supplied precious little actual reporting on the subject of Biden\u2019s 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. When Biden would deliver a forceful speech, as on State of the Union night, Fox\u2019s commentators seemed caught off guard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Consider the recent controversies over so-called \u201ccheapfake\u201d videos of Biden. He really has, at times, appeared to wander off and freeze up in front of cameras. But some of the videos hyped by Biden critics were misleading, even maliciously so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pro-Trump media outlets took a clip of Biden pausing before sitting down in a chair and claimed<\/a> that there was no chair there at all. Online meme makers imagined<\/a> that he was defecating during a D-Day ceremony.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Those types of lies caused at least a little bit of hesitation among good-faith reporters. As one said to me, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to feed into a bad-faith caricature.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the answer to bad-faith attacks can\u2019t be a supine press, and journalists have a chance now to prove they\u2019re up to the task of reporting this story. The public deserves to know more about Biden\u2019s health, and it is owed more insight into how the president is functioning in the White House.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

We live in the era of a gerontocracy. Were Trump to win, he\u2019d be 82 at the end of his second term \u2014 older than Biden is now. \u201cThe Biden-is-old story is a small piece of a bigger story, which is that our entire government is really old, across all branches,\u201d said Alter, who wrote the 2020 book The Ones We\u2019ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

That new generation is still waiting for its turn. So questions of age will come up over and over again. Reporters who push past hostile press offices and recalcitrant readers to get to the facts will have met the moment \u2014 and delivered to the public what it deserves.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Brian Stelter<\/a> is the author of three books about the media industry, a former media reporter at the<\/em> New York Times, and a former anchor of<\/em> CNN\u2019s <\/em>Reliable Sources.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 vox.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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