The Media Helped Cover Up Biden’s Cognitive Decline

Parroted claims of “cheap fakes” were just the latest in a long series of press deceptions about Biden’s mental shortcomings.

Following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, in a comment to Semafor, lamented that “the Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline."

Left unsaid by Abramson was that the Biden admin had a willing accomplice in this coverup: the mainstream media. 

Throughout Biden’s term, the media has claimed—over and over and over again—that Biden’s age and mental capabilities weren’t a problem. 

That artifice came crumbling down at the debate in late June, as Biden’s mental limitations were made manifest. Panic set in across the Democratic Party. Calls for Biden to step aside mounted. Biden’s former boosters in the press made clear that the octogenarian president—the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee by acclimation for 2024—was too old to mount another electoral challenge.

It makes their suggestions to the contrary—some weeks or even mere days before the debate—even more damning. 

Media coverage: The most visceral recent example of the press obfuscating concerns about Biden’s mental state came just two weeks before the debate. New, embarrassing videos of Biden seemingly lacking the mental ability to do simple things (sit down in a chair, walk off a stage, dance along at a rally, etc.) had started to pile up, circulated by conservative outlets and internet voices. 

In response, the White House declared the videos were “cheap fakes,” disinformation to make the president look bad in the lead-up to an election. The media, as ever, dutifully pushed the claim. 

Perhaps the most preposterous comes from the Washington Post. In a “fact check” of the “cheap fakes,” from two weeks ago, the Post gave “Four Pinocchios” (reserved for the most egregious lies) to allegedly manipulated videos showing Biden clearly displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype” while quoting the White House to say the videos were “cheap fakes” to mislead people.

 I wish this were a joke, but part of the Post’s defense was an editorial claim from the outlet that: “Biden…has often said he doesn’t dance.”

 

The New York Times mounted a similar effort, blaming “misleading videos” for creating “the distorted, online version” of Biden where conservatives “twisted mundane moments to paint him in an unflattering light.” The result was that “conspiracy theories” about Biden’s supposed mental defects were “spiraling across social media.”

The piece ran six days before the debate. 

 

Then there was this one, also from the Times. The subtitle would make Stalin blush. 

 

NBC News lamented how fact-checkers could hardly keep up with all the lies, “willed into vitality” by the “conservative media ecosystem” about Biden’s supposed mental shortcomings. Didn’t they know that “at least 6 mainstream outlets” had already fact-checked these claims?

The Associated Press may actually have been the most egregious example. The outlet published a piece six days before the debate titled (I’m not joking): “Seeing is believing? Not necessarily when it comes to video clips of Biden and Trump.” The piece predictably suggests the videos were “misinformation” from right-wing voices. But one quote really made me need a break from the coverage. AP referenced an expert and wrote off the underlying reality with:

“The clips have been especially effective at activating concerns about Biden's competency, according to Nisbet, because he is the oldest sitting president the U.S. has ever had, and he moves with more difficulty than he once did.”

I don’t think people are concerned about Biden’s mental wherewithal “because he is the oldest sitting president the U.S. has ever had, and he moved with more difficulty than he once did.” I have a hard time thinking that AP actually believes that. 

And AP valiantly fact checked another supposedly misleading video about Biden appearing to freeze at a Hollywood fundraiser. The truth wasn’t in what your lyin’ eyes might tell you, dear reader, but in the strenuous denials from Biden’s and Jimmy Kimmel’s comms teams. 

They weren’t alone. The Wrap—again, I’m not kidding, line is highlighted below—blamed Biden’s “stutter.”

But the pushback against these supposedly misleading videos was uniform across the mainstream press. Here are headlines from the New Republic, Reuters, ABC News, The Hill, the Daily Beast, Mother Jones, NBC News, CNN and Rolling Stone.

I could only fit nine in the above, so here’s a few more, from MSNBC, CBS News, Washington Post (a different one), Crooked Media (hah), and Deadline.

The irony in all of this is that the Biden team pushed for the debate that dashed their disinformation as a way to rebut claims about Biden’s mental competency. It’s hard to imagine anyone concerns were allayed. 

But this wasn’t the first time the media had run interference on the visible-to-the-naked-eye notion that Biden’s age was becoming a problem. 

At the conclusion of an investigation into Biden’s mishandling of documents back in February, special counsel Robert Hur determined that, while Biden had likely broken the law, it wouldn’t make sense to prosecute him in part because because a jury would see the leader of the free world as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden couldn’t remember, even within a range of years, major life moments, such as when his son Beau died, or when he left office as vice president. 

The media leapt to dispute the characterization. 

The New York Times claimed that diagnosing memory problems wasn’t something anyone could just do. Experts were needed. The experts were here to tell you not to worry. 

(In retrospect, that makes this side by side hard to explain, huh?)

This episode was a real barn burner for “experts say” journalism. NBC News’s hand-picked experts suggested that the guy with the nuclear codes not remembering the most important moments of his life was nothing to worry about. Surely, a bad memory “doesn’t affect decision-making or judgement,” these “experts” said. 

Don’t you feel relieved?

The Associated Press and Washington Post both dutifully explained how POTUS’s brain not working was just like any parent who had mixed up their kids’ names. 

CNN went even further. Their “expert”(a comms professor…really) said that these sorts of “slips of the tongue” “do not necessarily indicate a broader problem.” Again, this to describe Biden not being able to remember when his child died. 

And for years prior, the media claimed that attacks against Biden’s memory and mental functions were “ageist,” or something thereabouts. Time magazine really led the charge. Give these two headlines and descriptions a read. 

But others repeated this claim in Biden’s defense, too. Here’s NPR, CBS News, the incomparable ladies of The View, Forbes (times two), and the unparalleled Will Bunch of the Philly Inquirer:

 

The real gem, though, was a June 2023 piece from the Times: “Inside the Complicated Reality of Being America's Oldest President.” In a story that—particularly in the harsh light of retrospect—reads like it could describe the leader of North Korea, the Times describes Biden as “trim and fit,” a man who has:

…at times exhibited striking stamina, such as when he flew to Poland then boarded a nine-hour train ride to make a secret visit to Kyiv, spent hours on the ground, then endured another nine-hour train ride and a flight to Warsaw.

On these international trips, Biden “often outlasts younger colleagues,” the Times claimed. Ignore the Bidenesque gaffes, the Times “reported,” because (emphasis mine), “advisers said his judgment is as good as ever. So many of them use the phrase ‘sharp as a tack’ to describe him that it has become something of a mantra.”

I wish I were making it up. But you can’t fake screenshots. 

The facts: The dust hasn’t settled on what the Democratic Party will do following the public realization that their standard-bearer doesn’t possess the mental faculties to do much of anything, nonetheless lead the free world. But the American people are catching on to the reality. Polls are damning:

Calls for him to step aside have mounted. Most of the press has felt liberated to finally talk about the elephant in the room. 

Some, like CBS News, Axios, and NBC News, have kept the fiction going, repeating the Biden campaign’s preposterous suggestion that a “cold” had been the culprit for his disastrous debate performance. 

 

And then there’s…whatever this is, from the Associated Press. 

The media, once again, acted as if they had no knowledge of what they had been saying on this score for months. Little space has been dedicated to interrogating why the mainstream media, in unison, vouched for someone ill-equipped to take care of himself to retain sole access to the nuclear codes. Mostly just this one, half-hearted and beleaguered take from CNN, that is chock-full of excuses.

The takeaway: There are more complex answers about why the media hid the truth. Perhaps they really, somehow, believed the president was just a little feeble, a little halting. Maybe the White House really did do an effective job at hiding the president’s decline. 

But there is a simpler—and darker—explanation. With the media’s nemesis par excellence, Donald Trump, his opponent on the ballot, it seems more likely that the press was willing to accept any version of Biden on offer. This clip from MSNBC’s Joy Reid about voting for Biden even if he were in a coma epitomizes the sentiment. 

If nothing else, it seems reasonable to conclude that the media was comfortable with whomever is currently, actually, running the White House (Harris? His staff? Does it matter?) continuing to do so, rather than a return of Trump. 

Few things could help prevent a Trump election better than hiding from the public Biden’s deteriorating mental condition. It’s exactly what the mainstream media did for years, until the lie became untenable. 

It is an embarrassment to the institution of journalism, not just to ignore that the President obviously cannot execute the functions of his office, but to actively obfuscate that fact. 

That it might have been done to influence the outcome of an election? In the parlance of the mainstream press, I believe that’s known as “election interference.”