Did the media fail to do its job covering Joe Biden’s decline?

In late 1919 US president Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke that would physically and mentally incapacitate him for many months, but which was concealed from the American people by his inner circle.

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt’s inability to walk was similarly hushed up, as were Dwight Eisenhower’s two heart attacks in office in the 1950s, John F Kennedy’s crippling back pain in the 1960s, and Ronald Reagan‘s symptoms of dementia in the mid-1980s.

For a time at least, all of these were kept from voters despite being known in elite circles, including parts of the media.

In that sense, the controversy over the alleged cover-up of Joe Biden‘s physical and cognitive decline during his presidency (an allegation that looks increasingly plausible following the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, Original Sin) is just the latest instalment in a long presidential tradition.

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It has, admittedly, proved the most consequential of the lot; none of the others caused a sitting president to drop out of his re-election race with just three months to go.

But that dramatic reversal was ultimately due to a catastrophic debate performance that in a few short minutes crystallised all the whispers and suspicions about Biden’s real condition.

In that crude sense, the media did its job. The cameras in the Atlanta studio brutally revealed the truth. But the broader question of whether journalists could have done more and earlier to uncover that truth remains contentious.

In some of the responses to Original Sin you can see a desire to move on. After all, there’s a real and present threat to media freedom under way right now from the current administration’s legal assaults on ABC and CBS. And there’s alarming evidence that those networks’ corporate owners, Disney and Paramount, are only too willing to bend the knee.

But the questions won’t go away.

“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 White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC a few weeks ago. “But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We – myself included – missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it.”

[ Maureen Dowd: The tragedy of Joe Biden is that he was poisoned by powerOpens in new window ]

That statement provoked a furious response from veteran broadcaster Chuck Todd, who, in a tone that will startle those familiar with his TV persona, posted on Substack that “the virtue-signalling that some people have done, to try to say that the media missed this story – they didn’t miss this story ... You know why that’s all out there? Because the media fucking showed it!”

Perhaps. Certainly, if you search for “Biden” and “cognitive” across US media in 2023 and the first half of 2024 you’ll get plenty of results. Many, but not all, came from the right-wing media sphere, and were often just overwrought punditry with little in the way of supporting evidence.

It seems probable that the ferocity of these partisans attacks on Biden’s cognition contributed to the excessive caution with which the story was treated by the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN.

The attacks haven’t ended. Reacting to Thompson’s words, current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the “legacy media” were responsible for “one of the greatest cover-ups and scandals that ever took place in American history”.

Not for the first time, polarised hyperbole has poisoned US media’s capacity to do its supposed job of reporting factual information in an objective manner. It’s inconceivable that antipathy to Trump did not contribute to undue deference to his opponent.

But as Jon Allsop pointed out in the New Yorker last week, “the media” is not some sort of coherent, unified entity. Conspiracy theories are seductive because they offer an over-arching black and white narrative in which everything can be explained. Random errors, muddled thinking and unexamined motives are a little less attractive.

The truth is that while reporters such as Thompson at Axios and opinion writers such as Ezra Klein at the New York Times became increasingly vocal about their concerns over Biden’s condition, the subject was not addressed by their employers with the tenacity and resources it deserved.

One element of this sorry saga that makes it different, I think, from Wilson, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy and even Reagan is the “hiding in plain sight” part.

Yes, Biden’s inner circle were deliberately concealing his low energy levels, making sure he would only be seen in public within his few “good” hours. And yes, it is clear they made sure any expressions of concern from within the Democratic Party were ruthlessly crushed.

But this is not the 1920s. Even in a presidential system, where the leader of the country is not held to account by parliament, there will be video evidence and eyewitness accounts available, as there were here.

In a way, the most damning indictment of the media’s performance is that it failed to reflect the clear public judgment, recorded unambiguously over three years’ worth of opinion polls, that Biden was too old and should not run again.

That failure gives fuel to the accusation that modern journalists – not just in the US – have become a disconnected elite, excessively monocultural, politically conformist and too close to the institutions that they are supposed to hold to account.

There is some truth to all that, but it doesn’t fully account for how this saga played out. Donald Trump, inevitably, plays a role. Discussions about mental acuity and fitness for office might have taken a different course if Nikki Haley had been the Republican nominee.

Regardless, when both your emperors are naked, the media’s role is to report that fact, not decide that one of them is partially clothed.